Abstract
Abstract. This paper examines the feasibility of using data from OpenStreetMap (OSM), Facebook and Foursquare as a source of information on the function of buildings. Such information is rarely openly available and if available, would vary between cities by nomenclature, making comparisons between places difficult. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) including data from social media represents new potential sources of building function data that have not yet been exploited for this purpose. Using a part of the city of Milan as the study area, building data from OSM and points of interest (POIs) from OSM, Facebook and Foursquare were extracted to derive the building function. This resulted in the classification of building function for more than 80 % of the buildings and demonstrated that both Facebook and Foursquare can complement the building function derived from OSM, helping to fill in missing gaps. This preliminary study has demonstrated the potential of this approach for deriving building function information from open data in a simple way yet still requires independent validation with alternative sources as well as extension to other areas that have different amounts of OSM and social media coverage.
Highlights
Information on the function of buildings, i.e. whether a building is commercial, residential, industrial, mixed use, etc., is sometimes recorded by local authorities or by national mapping agencies
In lieu of actual data from authoritative databases, we can turn to Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) (Goodchild, 2007) as a potential source of building function data
OSM contains Points of Interest (POIs), which can be used to complement the building information found in OSM
Summary
Information on the function of buildings, i.e. whether a building is commercial, residential, industrial, mixed use, etc., is sometimes recorded by local authorities or by national mapping agencies Such data are rarely openly available, yet they are incredibly valuable for a number of different applications ranging from the determination of energy demand (Caputo et al, 2013), evaluation of contributions to greenhouse gas emissions (Lucon et al, 2014) and as inputs to urban climate and energy balance modelling (Tornay et al, 2017). Foursquare is a mobile application that connects people with geographic locations, including buildings that have specific functions such as a restaurant or cafe Together these different sources can be integrated to produce a
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