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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • We utilized building footprint datasets from various sources (see Table 2), including OSM (OpenStreetMap contributors, 2025), Google Open buildings (Google Research, 2023), Microsoft Building Footprints (Microsoft, 2024), and CLSM (Shi et al., 2024). Since none of the above-mentioned footprints is complete, we also generated our own global building polygons from an updated version of GlobalBuildingMap (Zhu et al., 2024),

    As I’m a frequent OSM contributor, I’m familiar with those other datasets, and they are shit. Just zoom in any river or lake near a city and you will find houses in the water, clearly grid based building are nicely dancing around, etc. The demoed areas are from OSM, and mostly drawn manually, you can see them on a lot other sources without the low quality AI gen contours, e.g.:

    Edit: I read it through, and the actual research is they acquired building height data, and added it to the already existing datasets:

    All the aforementioned datasets are mostly 2d. OSM has some building height data.

    And their point is not to have a detailed and end user friendly dataset, just a global one,






  • Very nice project! Thank you for using OpenStreetMap! I love it when the project I contribute to gets used in interesting projects like this!

    But some quick notes, related to the map display: It’s called OpenStreetMap, there is no s at the end, written in CamelCase without spaces. The other more important problem is you forgot to include the attribution text on the map. For using OSM there is only one requirement, you have to display “© OpenStreetMap” somewhere on a corner of the map. More info about this on the website of the OSM foundation: https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guidelines

    I see the attribution text is displayed on http://trails.tchncs.de/ but not on https://demo.wanderer.to/ so I don’t know what’s going on.

    The basemap display on the demo website uses the tile server from openstreeetmap.org. This is very discouraged, and also can give bad experience to users. The tiles on osm.org are raster tiles, they are regenerated automatically after a change in the map data, they are aimed as a tool for map contributors, not end users. You can read more about this here: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/

    There is a new totally free maplibre compatible vector tile provider, which uses the same map data, I recommend to switch to OpenFreeMap. Users can also self host OpenFreeMap, so some really privacy minded users could totally self host the full project this way.