150 million new buildings for Mapbox Maps
Comprehensive building coverage in key geographies including the United States, Canada, and Australia
By: Ben Levin
We’ve just added more than 150 million buildings in the United States, Canada, Australia, UAE, Tanzania, and Uganda to our map, a 360% increase for our building coverage.
Our new building data dramatically improves coverage in cities that previously only had building data in urban cores. For example, here’s a look at Minneapolis before and after this new data:
Like all of our data sources, this new building layer is validated across multiple dimensions including valid geometry, source conflict, satellite/aerial imagery, and finally, manually review. Here’s how we control quality using each of those dimensions:
- Multi-source conflation: Where multiple of our data sources report the same buildings, we conflate conflicting shapes and detect overlaps. We’ve built logic to differentiate among providers and find the most accurate building geometry.
- Multi-layer tests: We check for overlap of map layers — for instance, we check that buildings do not overlap the road and water layers
- Validation against satellite and aerial data: Using satellite and aerial imagery, we identify building footprints and then validate the detected buildings before they make it onto our map
- Manual edits: When needed, Mapbox editors intervene to correct building footprints or remove incorrect buildings.
Of our many sources, we’d like to especially thank the Microsoft Maps Team and the global OpenStreetMap community for their continued curation and creation of high-quality building data.
Getting started with Buildings
Start building with Style Components in the new Studio to start using buildings data now.
Maps feature data from Mapbox and OpenStreetMap and their data partners.
