Jan Marsch
OSM Buildings
Berlin, Germany
Jan lives in Berlin, Germany.
After studying business informatics he entered IT consulting with major customers like Lufthansa, Bayer and Daimler. When working with Nokia Maps (HERE) he found his obsession for digital geography and 3d building visualisation.
He started the open source project OSM Buildings in 2012, worked for humanitarian GIS projects and gave lectures at Beuth University Berlin.
He is CEO and founder of 3dbuildings, a data company providing worldwide building data.
Links
Topics
Building Quality
Just let’s put all that Microsoft building data in!
The amount of buildings in this and other open data sources is tempting. It’s well possible to top existing 485 Million OSM buildings up to Billion in total.
But did you have a look at what you are going to import here?
Have you checked geometries for validity? What does validity even mean? Are there too low, too small, or too large buildings?
Then the fun begins with solving overlapping objects. Which candidate is more correct?
At least empty spots are trivial to fill. Unless you’re going to replace a recently demolished building in OSM.
At some point you may find yourself asking: “what about quality in OpenStreetMap itself”?
We’ll discuss id’s, creative attributes and the question of all questions: what is a building at all?