Dominican Republic Building Footprints from OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap volunteer mappers have contributed building footprint data across the Dominican Republic, tagged for uses from residential homes to hospitals and schools. Coverage is likely denser in urban areas and sparser in remote regions, reflecting mapper activity. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) exports this data under the ODbL license.

Use Cases

• Estimate population distribution based on building density and type.
• Assess potential damage from natural disasters using building location and footprint data.
• Plan urban infrastructure and services based on the spatial distribution of buildings.
• Cross-reference local field knowledge for community development or humanitarian projects.

Strengths

• Data includes a variety of building types, from residential to institutional, as indicated by the `building=*` tagging scheme.
• Available in multiple geospatial formats (GEOPACKAGE, SHP, JSON) for compatibility with various GIS tools.
• Sourced from OpenStreetMap, a free, collaborative global mapping project.

Limitations

• Coverage is uneven, with urban areas likely well-represented and remote areas sparse, as noted in the description.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics and data structure must be inspected after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap

Collection Method

Volunteer geographic information (VGI) collection via the OpenStreetMap platform.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-27 05:08:04.942464; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Dominican Republic