This guidance document aims at summarizing the global strategy followed by the ESPON 2020 MapKits project for creating the ESPON MapKits : (1) Enlarging mapping possibilities and support the growing availability of data in a European perspective. (2) Focus on uses and quality. (3) Promote the dissemination of open source information. The last part (4) describes the data sources used to create the layers included in ESPON MapKits.