About our crawler

We collect public planning data from the authorities listed below, in 5 countries. This page explains exactly what we do, so that anyone at any of them can see it without having to ask.

Identity

Our fetcher sends this user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PlanningIntelligence/0.1; +contact@planningintel.com)

One identity for every country. We do not present ourselves as a browser, and we do not use a name that could be mistaken for another organisation's crawler.

What we fetch, by country

Flanders

Published by Departement Omgeving, Vlaanderen.

• Omgevingsloket permit register (WFS lu:lu_omv_gd_v2) — Modellicentie Gratis Hergebruik, updated continuous
  https://www.mercator.vlaanderen.be/raadpleegdienstenmercatorpubliek/wfs
• VRBG Refgem — the 285 municipality boundaries, with NIS codes — Modellicentie Gratis Hergebruik, updated annual
  https://geo.api.vlaanderen.be/VRBG/wfs

Malta

Published by Planning Authority (PA).

• ArcGIS MapServer — case polygons — robots: Allow, search=yes, use=reference, ai-train=no, updated continuous
  https://mapserver.pa.org.mt/hosting/rest/services
• PlanningMT mobile API — CaseInfoProvider — public, undocumented terms, updated continuous
  https://mobileapp.pa.org.mt/CaseInfoProvider.pa
• Government Gazette PA notices — official publication, updated weekly
  https://www.gov.mt/en/Government/DOI/Government Gazette/pa/Documents/

Poland

Published by GUNB — Główny Urząd Nadzoru Budowlanego.

• RWDZ — register of applications, decisions and notifications — CC0 1.0 (public domain), updated weekly
  https://wyszukiwarka.gunb.gov.pl/pliki_pobranie/rwdz.xml
• RWDZ public API — CC0 1.0, updated continuous
  https://dev.wyszukiwarka.gunb.gov.pl/API

Ireland

Published by Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

• National Planning Applications (ArcGIS FeatureServer) — CC-BY-4.0, updated continuous
  https://services.arcgis.com/NzlPQPKn5QF9v2US/arcgis/rest/services/IrishPlanningApplications/FeatureServer/1

France

Published by SDES — Ministère de la Transition écologique.

• Sitadel — base des permis de construire — Licence Ouverte 2.0 (attribution only), updated monthly
  https://www.data.gouv.fr/datasets/base-des-permis-de-construire-et-autres-autorisations-durbanisme-sitadel

What we deliberately do not do

• We do not fetch anything from www.pa.org.mt, which is protected by bot management. We do not attempt to work around it.
• We do not access anything behind a login — an eID, an account, or a portal that asks us to register.
• We do not scrape individual council portals. Where a national dataset links to a council's own file — as Ireland's does — we store the link and the reader follows it themselves. We do not fetch it.
• We do not use this data to train AI models, and we honour content signals that ask us not to.
• We do not collect personal data beyond what the authority itself publishes, and we honour erasure requests permanently — see privacy.

How politely

• One request at a time — never parallel.
• At least 1.2 seconds between requests.
• Exponential backoff on any error, and we stop rather than hammer.
• A full refresh is a small number of requests: we page 2,000 records at a time.
• Where a source offers a bulk file, we take the file rather than paging an API — it is one request instead of thousands, and it is what the publisher intended.

Ask us to stop

Email contact@planningintel.com and we will stop. No argument, no delay.