Import/Africa Buildings

This is a plan for the addition of Open Buildings data for Africa that has been created and shared by Google Research. This effort builds on recent assisted mapping projects in which buildings data has been prepared for mappers to add to OpenStreetMap via OSM editors (see Data Updates section below). For a list of other Esri-curated datasets that are available for mapping, please see Esri ArcGIS Datasets.

Goals

The goal of this effort is to add the Open Buildings data for Africa to the existing set of buildings that exist in Africa. This effort would greatly enhance the coverage of buildings for Africa, while retaining the many buildings already added to OSM.

Schedule

Google Research announced the availability of the Open Buildings for Africa in July 2021. Esri downloaded and prepared the data for use in selected OSM editors in October 2021. The edits to OSM would be performed incrementally by OSM mappers over the remainder of 2021 and beyond, starting after data is reviewed by the OSM community.

Source

The processed building footprints that could be added to OSM are available to access on ArcGIS Online (see Africa Buildings). You can Open in Map Viewer to preview (click features to view tags) or sign in to export data for offline use.

OSM ODbL Compliance: Yes, the data is provided under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 license.

Data Preparation

The processed building footprints referenced above were created using these Esri Data Processing Steps for Buildings and Addresses, developed and refined while doing data prep for several city and county communities in the United States. Below are a couple notes specific to the Africa Buildings data.

• The processed building footprints data contains 53,471,586 buildings, most of which do not already existing as building features in OSM.
• This is a subset of the full dataset of 516M buildings shared by Google Research, filtered to only include buildings with a confidence score of at least 85% (i.e. 0.85).
• The data includes a single field (building) that has been added by Esri for as a tag in OSM (i.e. building=yes). The Africa Buildings layer includes a few other fields that were part of the source data format, such as confidence.

Data Conflation

Existing building features in OSM will not be replaced. The plan is for OSM mappers to add new buildings for selected areas by using and modifying the building footprints and adding additional tags that are appropriate (e.g. street, city, country).

Data Updates

The plan is to perform the updates using a updated version of RapiD and an updated Map with AI plugin for JOSM (see Esri blog post on new tools in OSM editors for more detail). The new tools enable OSM mappers to access ArcGIS Datasets hosted in ArcGIS Online and select individual features to use while editing OSM. The mapper is able to select a feature, review and edit the feature geometry and available fields, and then save their edits.

The mapper has the benefit of using existing features that have been created by the data provider, along with their available field values that have been pre-processed by Esri, while also being able to compare that feature with existing OSM data (e.g. street names) and imagery to ensure it is accurate and consistent. The data source used for the edit will be added as a tag to each feature that is saved as part of a changeset unless deleted by mapper.

Accounts

The plan is for OSM mappers to use their standard OSM accounts if they are editing with RapiD and JOSM editors for OSM and editing individual features. However, if OSM mappers wish to do any 'bulk' edits or imports where they do not examine individual features, then they should create and use new dedicated import accounts (e.g. <username>_<community>_import) for those changesets.