Data sources

BuildingsScore is only as good as the data under it. Here's exactly what powers each part — and where the limits are.

What powers what

Source	Powers	Coverage
OpenStreetMap (via Overpass)	Roads & highways, railways, transit stops (metro/tram/bus/train), parks, forests, water, industry, farmland, airports	🌍 Global
Google Maps Platform	The base map, Places (shops, food, services, ratings & photos), and place details	🌍 Global
Google Air Quality API	The live Air quality dimension (Universal AQI)	🌍 Most regions
OSRM / Valhalla	Street-following walking routes to nearby places	🌍 Global
Nominatim (OpenStreetMap)	Turning a clicked point into a street address	🌍 Global
EU END / European Environment Agency	Real modeled aircraft-noise (Lden dB) contours feeding the Quiet score	🇪🇺 23 EU countries
Open-Meteo	Ground elevation — the basis of the flood-risk proxy	🌍 Global

Why two map databases?

Google Places has the best coverage of businesses — shops, restaurants, ratings and photos. OpenStreetMap has the best coverage of the physical world — the exact shape of a park, where a railway runs, the full extent of a transit network. BuildingsScore uses each for what it does best: distances to parks, water and rail come from OpenStreetMap's real geometry (nearest edge, not a far-off centre), while shops and their ratings come from Google.

Where the estimates are — and why

Three things genuinely can't be read off a map of places. We're upfront about each:

• Flight noise. In 23 European countries we use the EU's official modeled noise contours (real decibel bands). Outside those, we fall back to a simple proxy: distance to the nearest airport — which ignores flight paths and aircraft type, so treat it as a rough hint, not a measurement.
• Flood risk. Estimated from low elevation plus closeness to water. This is a proxy, not a hydrological flood-zone model; a real model (e.g. FEMA or global flood rasters) is a planned upgrade.
• Crime. Not used at all. There is no free, global, point-level crime dataset, so rather than show something misleading we leave it out. "Safety" reflects emergency-service proximity only.

Freshness

Air quality is fetched live for each location. Map features and places are cached for up to ~60 days and then refreshed — surroundings change slowly, and caching keeps the tool fast and free to run. OpenStreetMap itself updates continuously as its community edits it.

Attribution & licensing

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Map base, places and air quality © Google. Aircraft-noise contours © European Environment Agency / EU Member States under the Environmental Noise Directive. Elevation by Open-Meteo. We're grateful to these projects — BuildingsScore wouldn't exist without open data.

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