There are excellent global open datasets available, like OpenStreetMap, Natural Earth and others, but it is often beneficial to use smaller, local datasets for reasons like coherency, completeness, and regional specialities.

National Mapping Agencies (NMAs) are organisations in government structures that produce authoritative geospatial data and maps for a country or region. In Europe, there is continuing trend to make data produced in public sector available as open data and many spatial datasets from numerous countries (mapping agencies) are also available as open data.

Most NMAs do not limit their work and available data to classical map products and operate also in related fields: land cadastre, geodesy, addresses and place names, to name a few. It is good to know about the existence of such geospatial datasets also, especially if made available as open data and services, as these could be very useful to many projects.
Additionally, the sources of modern country-level mapping (aerial and terrestrial imagery, lidar point clouds, etc.) are useful not only for national mapping programs but also for wide range of other applications and use cases.

Estonian Land Board is one of the European NMAs sharing its produced data openly. In this talk we take a look at data samples from Estonia and elsewhere: what is available, how to find it and in which file formats/services the data is distributed. Additional tips are given towards Pan-European initiatives (EuroGeographics, GeoE3, etc.) and regulations (INSPIRE, Open data Directive, etc.) that aim to make data from each country more openly and uniformly interoperable and accessible, thus providing potential value-added service to end users who need similar data from several European countries.