Taiwan Building Footprints from OpenStreetMap

A 2026 export of building footprints across Taiwan from OpenStreetMap. It includes every feature tagged as a building, from residential homes to hospitals, schools, and places of worship. The data is provided by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and is useful for population estimation, damage assessment, and urban planning.

Use Cases

• Estimate population distribution based on building density and types.
• Assess building damage after a disaster using pre-event footprint data.
• Analyze urban development patterns and land use based on building locations.
• Plan infrastructure and services using the spatial distribution of buildings.

Strengths

• Includes every OpenStreetMap feature tagged as a building, suggesting broad coverage.
• Covers multiple building types, from residential to institutional, as mentioned in the description.
• Data is available in multiple geospatial formats (GEOPACKAGE, SHP, 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.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-15.

Geography

Taiwan