Legal
The corpus and your building
This notice is for the owner of a building that appears in the herimap corpus. You may never have contacted us — the record came from public sources — so this sets out what we hold, where it came from, why, and how to have it corrected or removed.
What we hold about a building
For each building we hold a name, a location, a building type, the identifiers of the public records it was drawn from, and an estimate of whether it is privately owned together with the short reason that estimate rests on.
We do not hold an owner's name, postal address, telephone number or email address for a building in the corpus. None of it was collected from an owner. If you claim a building and create an account, that is a separate relationship and the privacy notice covers it.
The ownership figure is an estimate produced by automated classification of public records. It is not a search of any land register, it is published with its measured error rates, and for some buildings it is wrong.
Where it came from
Every record derives from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata, two openly licensed public databases. It was not obtained from you. We add nothing about a building that was not already in one of those sources, apart from the ownership estimate, which we derive from them.
Each record links back to the specific upstream entries it came from, so you can see the original — and correct it there too, if you would rather fix it at the source.
When this is personal data
A building is not a person. But a record that names a house and estimates that it is privately owned can, in some circumstances, be information about an identifiable person — where a house is publicly associated with a family, for instance. We would rather say that plainly than argue that it never happens.
Where it is the case, the rights below apply. You do not have to establish that it is the case before writing to us.
Why we hold it
To publish research on how unevenly Europe's privately owned heritage is documented. A study commissioned by the European Commission identified a lack of comprehensive data on this sector; the corpus exists to measure that gap, and the ownership estimate is the part that makes the measurement possible at all.
We rely on our legitimate interest in carrying out and publishing that research. You have the right to object to it, and the next section says how.
How to object, correct or remove
Write to info@herimap.eu with the name and location of the building. You do not need an account, and you do not need to give a reason.
You can ask us to correct anything that is wrong, to drop the ownership estimate while leaving the building on the map, or to remove the record altogether. We will act on it and tell you what we did.
One limit, stated rather than buried: a published dataset that someone has already downloaded cannot be recalled from them. We will correct or remove the record on the site and in every later release, and note the change in the release that carries it.
How long we keep it
Corpus records are kept for as long as the research continues. A record you ask us to remove is taken off the site and excluded from later releases of the dataset.
Your rights
Where the record is personal data about you, you can ask to see it, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict what we do with it, and to object to our processing it. Write to info@herimap.eu.
You can also complain to your national data protection authority. The controller's identity and the rest of our data-protection information are in the privacy notice.
This document is published in English, Czech, German, Spanish, French and Italian. Where the versions differ, the English text applies.