Thinking Machines Data Science is releasing TM Open Buildings, a dataset of manually-drawn building outlines covering 12 Philippine cities with detailed annotations on building and roof attributes as seen over satellite imagery. We contribute the buildings in OpenStreetMap and also made available for download in Kaggle. This is made possible with the support from the Lacuna Fund.

Producing the dataset

The team has consulted HOTOSM Asia Pacific and community architects from the Philippine Action for Community-led Shelter Initiatives (PACSII) to validate our attributes and to ensure that our contributions are documented properly. We also looked at street-level views to check tags whenever available. We will take into consideration the feedback from local mappers as local knowledge always precedes, and will always provide changeset comments that are in compliance with OSM guidelines.

You may view more details of our process in our wiki page. Kindly use our Github Issues tab to file any specific concerns about the dataset.

License

This TM Open Buildings dataset is made available by Thinking Machines under the Open Database License (ODbL). Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License.

Building Definitions

We define the buildings we mapped, as well as the attributes included, in the table below. Please refer to our wiki page for more details. | Building Type |Subtype | Definition | Mapped Attributes |
|----------------|--------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------| | Settlement | Single | Residential houses that are individually distinct from surrounding structures | Roof material, Roof layout, Is within gated community? |
| | Dense | Tight clusters of small residential houses that do not have distinguishable boundaries | - |
| Non-settlement | | Commercial, industrial, or institutional buildings | Building height |

Coverage

The dataset covers selected 250m x 250m tiles in 12 Philippine cities, namely Dagupan City, Palayan City, City of Navotas, City of Mandaluyong, City of Muntinlupa, Legazpi City, Tacloban City, Iloilo City, Mandaue City, Cagayan de Oro City, Davao City, and Zamboanga City. The tiles are chosen to focus on residential areas that lie on a wide variety of terrains (urban, coastal, riparian, agricultural, etc.). All settlements and non-settlements within each tile are drawn manually. Data on the locations of the tiles are given in the following table.

Attributes

The following table contains the definitions of the attributes and how it is tagged in OSM. | Attribute | Type | Characteristics | OSM Key and Tag | |------------------------|------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------| | Roof Material | Natural/Galvanized Iron (GI)/Mixed | Looks rusty when old, silver/gray when new, lines and patches are usually evident. | roof:material = metal_sheet | | | Metal/Tiled | Whole roof is usually one solid color, tiled roofs have texture. | roof:material = roof_tiles | | | Concrete | Flat, usually has raised white edges, no visible roof “folds”, may be smooth or have objects on top. ...