InfoReseaux remarked that this data is suspicious, to say the least: CC BY-NC 4.0 but contains ODbL licensed data coming from Openstreetmap - but also from Microsoft.

Thread on the Openstreetmap forum: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/is-globalbuildingatlas...

Christian Quest sent the following message to the authors:

"I’m writing to you because I’m surprised by the choice of data license you’ve set on the GlobalBuildingAtlas dataset.

As mentioned and explained in your paper, at least two data sources you’ve been using to create this dataset are under the Open Database License (ODbL): OpenStreetMap and Microsoft building datasets.

I’ve downloaded the extract of data you’re proposing to have a look at the final dataset, and it confirms that building polygons from OSM (and Microsoft) are present in the resulting dataset in a substantial portion.

In such case, your dataset must be published under the ODbL licence (see 4.2), because it is a derivative database (see 1.0 of ODbL license for definition).

A copy of this message has also been sent to the Legal Working Group of the OSM Foundation.

Thanks in advance to fix quickly the license of the dataset you published. This will also allow OpenStreetMap contributors to use it to improve OpenStreetMap, which is not possible with the CC-BY-NC you choose."

Can confirm. My garage is marked double the height of my actual house. Both are incorrect. My shop building on my property, next to the garage is actually missing.

The positioning of the shapes in relation to each other are also wrong. And not in a subtle way.

Looked at the house my father built in 1985. A few hundred kilometers from my current location. The shape is wrong (as are the shapes of all neighboring buildings. As are the positions toward each other (distance between houses, rotation of shapes). The heights are also significantly wrong. The two story houses on the opposite side of the road are said to be slightly above 2 meters in height.

quite a lot of height errors, checked my neighborhood as well, often by orders of magnitude off.

I do a similar game when walking around but the complete inverse. I live in the UK.

You can fool me Dracula

Would need this, inverted, for winter.

arxiv:2510.18318

Looking around my home area, I found HS football bleachers showing up as buildings and an outdoor basketball court showing up as a building. Looking at the coloring of those features on Google maps, I can see how the mistakes might have been made. But still feels like it needs tuning.

To be fair, I checked my boyhood home in very rural Maine and it was correct for the size and shape of the multiple farm buildings.

Yeah some areas I looked at seemed fine (US, EU, Shangahi), but some the buildings are on top of the roads, and they look more like Perlin Noise than actual buildings. E.g main parts of Beijing.

OpenStreetMap and such have pretty good building footprints, sometimes enriched with building heights. Maybe that can be used for some correction

It's machine-learning generated "slop" honestly.

Looking at where I live and where I grew up the building heights are quite badly estimated.

- Some groups of houses around here that are more or less identically built but on sloped terrain are reported to have widly differing heights

- My neighbour building is reported to be half the height of this building (they're more or less equally high at 5 stories)

- A small office shack behind the neighbour building is reported to be taller than it (it's a single-story building, the neighbour building is 5 stories)

- The freestanding buildings on the farm where I grew up are like you said, badly combined, much of the estimation there seems to be dependent on shadows,etc.

Hey maps used to have sea serpents and winged griffins. It's a map. Maybe not the best map.

I checked the building heights where I live vs the actual heights, sometimes they display the height as half of what the actual height is.

You have uBlock Origin or another ad blocker installed, their cookie banner disables scrolling but your ad blocker is blocking the cookie banner (same thing happened to me)

For me it was the cookie notice. Had to disable uBlock and reject them before the page could be responsive again.

works for me on FF

If AI says a floating building is a building I will agree with it. It isn't wrong but it isn't right.

lol, AI lacking effective QA process it seems

Yup, check my home neighborhood and it is good coverage, but checked a rural area I know has houses around a lake (not just tiny fishing shacks, full-sized 200+m^2 houses) with addresses and electrical and telecom/internet service, but there there are no buildings shown. Plus, even though there is a lot of tree coverage, many of the houses are clearly visible in Google Satellite View, so it is unclear why they wouldn't have been picked up.

Cool stuff, but they still have work to do.

Where?

If it was able to detect roughly how many buildings there are in that area, that’s already fairly useful at global scale. It seems they are focused on measuring urbanization. It’s good to know though that it may be dodgy at that level of granularity.

Indeed, my neighborhood doesn't show any buildings at all even though I know all of our houses have been there at least 30 years and were still there when I left this morning.

I haven't visited the map, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn they didn't attempt to re-create the building shapes, just location and estimated size. The real shape seems pointless for this dataset.