ETHOS.BUILDA: Building Footprint and Height Dataset Germany

Introduction

This dataset contains all buildings in Germany with their footprint polygon and height. It is a partial dump of the ETHOS.BUILDA database (version v7_20240429). ETHOS.BUILDA is a database containing building-level data for the German building stock. It is based on various data sources that are combined and enriched with machine learning approaches to generate one consistent and complete building dataset. 

ETHOS.BUILDA is made available under the Open Database License (ODbL). The licenses of the contents of the database depend on the data source. The sources of the building attributes and information on the type of processing that was done to assign the information from the raw data to the building in ETHOS.BUILDA are provided for each individual data point.

Data structure and file overview

Building data is provided per federal state, the files are named according to the NUTS-1 region names. The building data has the following fields:

field name
description

ID
unique identifier of the building

source
the source of the building footprint

footprint
footprint polygon in WKT-format, EPSG:3035

height_m

value: height of the building in [m], 

source: source of the height data,

lineage: height assignment method

A mapping of the abbreviations of "source" and "lineage" of individual data points to the descriptions is provided in sources.csv and lineages.csv. There is no source entry for the source "v7_model.json" in the sources.csv file, as this refers to the internally trained machine learning model and not to an external dataset.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Helmholtz Association under the program "Energy System Design".