OpenData Overview

Besides various sources of open geometry data provided by the different communities, here is a collection of data collected on the larger scale level.

General Geometry

OpenStreetMap Data

Through the “Get Environment” (or Import OSM) tool, you have direct access to the world of OpenStreetMap data. Different to data from other sources like GIS or CAD, OpenStreetMap data are not organized in thematic or logical layers. The base element of the OSM data is a single node which can have several attributes (labels) in a non-restrictive way. Several nodes can be combined to polyline or polygon objects which can have their own attributes, too.

As Monde is organized in logical and thematic layers, the import of OSM data and the organisation of points and objects to a layer plus the capturing of the correct attributes is not straight forward and often ambiguous. Therefore it needs a complex import dialog to fulfil this task. There will be much advancement in this dialog in the upcoming versions of Monde and additional tutorials on this topic.

Many building information in OSM do not have height information, neither explicit as “height” nor implicit e.g. “Number of storeys”. So, additional data from local communities or Microsoft (see below) or hand-editing will be required for modelling purposes.

Microsoft Building Footprints

In 2017 and 2018 Microscoft released the data of 9.8 Mil. buildings (2017) and 125 Mil buildings (2018) from the US as Open Data (Blog-Post).

The 2018 release can be downloaded from GitHub in the GeoJSON format. As for now, Monde cannot directly read GeoJSON, you need to convert those to the Shapefile format, for example using this web service: GeoJSON to SHP File.

However, it seems that most of the building heights, which are essential when working with ENVI-met, are missing in the 2018 release. But in the smaller 2017 dataset, they are existing and read-to-use. While these data are not in GitHub, they can be accessed through the OpenStreetMap Wiki State-by-State (make sure to scroll down to March 2017 Release). Moreover, these data are already in the Shapefile format and can directly be imported into Mode.

Hint: First setup your Monde world with the georeference of your requested location and define the size of the map. Then import the shapefile and select the “Ignore objects outside of map” option. Otherwise you will get an extremely large dataset.

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