Papua New Guinea Building Footprints from OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap exports provide building footprints across Papua New Guinea. The data includes every feature tagged as a building, from residential homes to hospitals, schools, and places of worship. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) maintains this export, last updated on 2026-05-14.

Use Cases

• Population estimation based on building density and type.
• Damage assessment for disaster response based on building footprint changes.
• Urban planning and infrastructure development based on the location and distribution of buildings.
• Cross-referencing local field knowledge with mapped building data for validation.

Strengths

• Data is sourced from OpenStreetMap, a free, collaborative world map.
• Includes a variety of building types such as residential homes, hospitals, schools, and places of worship.
• Available in multiple geospatial file formats including GEOPACKAGE, SHP, and JSON.

Limitations

• Completeness varies by region; urban areas are usually well-mapped, remote areas may be incomplete.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap

Collection Method

Volunteer-contributed mapping via the OpenStreetMap platform.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-14 22:43:36.293528; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Papua New Guinea