Cognised existence: A building is a roofed, permanent physical structure that shelters human activity. It has use, age, size, and geometric footprint, and these properties may come from different sources.
Question: What buildings exist at a location and what are their characteristics?
OSM wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:building
Realisations
Instead of hardcoding implementation schemas here, SPHERE separates semantic meaning from dataset implementation. See the following realisations for how to access this data:
- [[Realisations/OpenStreetMap_buildings|OpenStreetMap —
building=*]]
Geometry Representations
| Rep ID | Source Dataset | Geometry Type | Native CRS | Suitable For | Not Suitable For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
buildings_osm_footprint | OpenStreetMap | Polygon | EPSG:4326 | Footprint mapping, area calculation, building count, urban morphology | Register-quality attributes (year, use code, heating) are sparse in OSM |
buildings_osm_centroid | OpenStreetMap (derived) | Point | EPSG:4326 | Density mapping, point-in-polygon, proximity counts | Area statistics, shadow and solar analysis |
Note: OSM building footprints are the best globally available open polygon source. Attribute quality varies strongly by region and editing community.
Limitations
- Attribute completeness varies widely by country and urban density.
- Year of construction (
start_date) is sparse globally. - Building type tags are inconsistent across regions.