What about importing Open Building?

General talk
1

Hello,
In a way to accelerate humanitarian mapping what do you think about importing Google’s Open Buildings?
I don’t know yet how it can be done, I’m reading the import guidelines and obviously a quality process has to be planed.

They covered 64% of Africa and generated 516M buildings (called “distinct structures”).

blog post

2

There was a discussion about this on the OSM Foundation member mailing list:
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2021-July/007984.html

Key points of the discussion include:

  1. The license isn’t compatible so we would need a waiver from Google to even make it legally possible to import the data. Mikel Maron is in contact with them to see if that’s an option.
  2. Some of the people who looked at the data feel that the data has to many errors to be worth importing.

Haven’t looked at the data quality myself so I can’t say if it’s good enough. But for now, we’ll have to wait if the legalities can be sorted out in the first place.

3

Ok, thank you.

4

There were numerous examples from active mappers in various African countries -Zambia & Ghana come immediately to mind - who were of the opinion that the data is not of adequate quality. Defects included not processing deep shadow properly; mapping boats or fishing platforms on major lakes, mapping ant hills (termite mounds) as buildings.

It’s quite likely that a single training set was used which probably would not take account of the huge variations across a massive continent.