I am always excited when I see a post from Mark Litwintschik on Hacker News; I know that means I’m going to learn about a cool new GIS dataset. When I saw his post about the The World’s 2.75B Buildings, I knew I was in for a treat.

The Dataset

Mark’s blog entry talks about the Global Building Atlas, a project from researchers at the Technical University of Munich to document every building on the surface of the earth. They developed an open-source pipeline to detect buildings from Planet Labs’ satellite imagery. I like this methdology because it has no regional bias; if this was a patchwork of national datasets, it might be simpler to create, but the data quality would vary depending upon the country of origin.