Maritime Boundaries are important for many applications. In biogeography for example, a layer of EEZ-polygons could be used for the creation of species distribution lists per country.
Up to now, there is no global public domain cover available. Therefore, the Flanders Marine Institute decided to develop an own database. The database includes two global GIS-layers: one contains polylines that represent the maritime boundaries of the world countries, the other one is a polygon layer representing the Exclusive Economic Zone of countries. The database also contains digital information about treaties.
As the information, on which the database is based, is in most cases freely available over the internet, we are not planning to charge any money for the distribution of the data and are considering the database as an Open-Source project. Since Maritime Boundaries are a relatively new concept, there are still a lot of countries that didn't agree with their neighbours about their maritime boundaries; new treaties will be negotiated in the next years. Therefore, we hope that users will contribute to this database and keep us up to date of new developments of their country's boundary or other countries that they are aware of.