3 ms·
I wish! Unfortunately, as far as I know, OSM building vectors aren't available for the vast majority of suburbs in the US/world, which is where I think AgentMap
by andrewtable 8y ago
I wish! Unfortunately, as far as I know, OSM building vectors aren't available for the vast majority of suburbs in the US/world, which is where I think AgentMaps would be most useful.
There's some paid services like http://osmbuildings.org http://osmbuildings.org but they're just as limited... and paid!!
I also didn't want to rely on a paid provider: that's why I chose Leaflet/OSM instead of Google maps, which has polygons for buildings. I felt pretty vindicated a few months later when they (apparently) raised their prices ~1400%, though!
Microsoft did release this (https://blogs.bing.com/maps/2018-06/microsoft-releases-125-million-building-footprints-in-the-us-as-open-data https://blogs.bing.com/maps/2018-06/microsoft-releases-125-m...), and I thought it'd have a lot more coverage. But their blog post makes it sound like it's already been integrated with OSM, which doesn't seem to have those hoped for polygons.
I was wary about generating houses just from the street vectors at first, and wasn't sure how I would even do it, but it ended up working out! They also made translating positions within units (like (1,1) for the back corner) convenient, which makes navigating agents around a lot easier.
So I'm less disappointed about the lack of building polys in OSM than I was at the beginning. I might say it kind of benefited me, even!
- maxerickson 8y agoI was thinking as an option where they do happen to exist. Then if someone wanted to use real buildings they could add them to OSM. The MS buildings haven't been merged yet.
- andrewtable 8y agoWhere do you track the progress of this MS-OSM project? And that sounds like a good idea. If I don't do it soon, feel free to implement it as an extension and I'll link to it from the AgentMaps repo!
- maxerickson 8y agoI don't think there is a good spot to watch just yet. There will be traffic on https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports and some pages on the OpenStreetMap wiki at some point.