Welcome to EUBUCCO

EUBUCCO is a scientific database of individual building footprints for 322+ million buildings across the 27 European Union countries, Norway, Switzerland, and the UK. It is composed of 55 open datasets, including government registries (62.2%), OpenStreetMap (17.4%), and Microsoft building footprints (20.4%) that have been collected, harmonized, and validated.

Attribute Coverage

The database provides high-granularity information for building type, height, floors, and construction year. To maximize utility, EUBUCCO distinguishes between Ground Truth, Merged (from other buildings footprint datasets), and Estimated (inferred with machine learning) attributes.

Attribute	Ground Truth	Merged	ML Estimated	Total Coverage
Type (res/non-res)	38.1%	7.4%	54.5%	100.0%
Subtype	17.3%	4.2%	78.5%	100.0%
Height	43.2%	0.1%	56.7%	100.0%
Floors	16.6%	3.4%	79.9%	100.0%
Construction Year	15.6%	0.3%	0.0%	15.9%

• Type categories: residential and non-residential.
• Subtype categories: industrial, commercial, public, agricultural, others, detached, semi-detached, terraced, and apartment.

For an assessment of attribute estimation quality, see the Prediction Evaluation section.

Accessing the Data

The data is stored as .parquet files on a S3-compatible object storage (MinIO) and can be accessed in multiple ways:

Method	Best For	Description
Website	Less technical users	Download individual region files via a map-based interface.
CLI	Bulk downloads	Sync entire countries or the full dataset to your local storage.
Python	Quick data exploration	Stream specific regions into memory (GeoPandas) or filter chunks (PyArrow).
SQL (DuckDB)	Advanced Filtering	Query the cloud data directly to download only specific subsets (e.g., buildings > 50m).
Zenodo	Research & Citations	Access stable, versioned snapshots for scientific reproducibility.

Contribute

You know of an open dataset that is not yet included or you've spotted a bug? Drop us an email at info(at)eubucco.com or open an issue in our GitHub repository.