Frequently Asked Questions

Why have you set up the project?

Initially we set out to collect and share numerical and categorical data relating to the age and land use of buildings for research into energy use and demolition, but we soon realised that the opportunity exists to capture many more types of data for use in all sorts of areas: from local history and heritage to building conservation, sustainable urban planning, architecture and the built environment.

Who is it designed for?

Anyone interested in London and its buildings and anyone interested in cities and large-scale building attribute datasets.

How will the data be used?

We have some ideas, but we also hope to be surprised! Our main task is to enable the collection, collation, visualisation and dissemination of the data. We are very excited to see how they are used. To help stimulate discussion and ideas we will include a data showcase which will allow anyone to share examples of how they use Colouring London data, and to provide examples of how similar datasets are being used elsewhere in the UK and around the world.

Is there anywhere else you can access this type of information at building level?

No, not for London as a whole. The Valuation Office Agency holds the most comprehensive records for tax purposes, but these are restricted at the building level, even for research within academia.

Why aren’t you crowdsourcing textual information on the history of buildings?

Our main focus is to collect data for modelling and statistical analysis, where numerical and categorical data tends to be most useful. However, we will collect links to other sites where text based information on a building can be created and shared. The Layers of London project by the Institute for Historical Research and the Histories of Whitechapel project by the Survey of London and the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) both have an interest in text (and audio and photographs). We are working in close collaboration with both projects.

Why did you choose these categories of data?

We have had conversations with many different groups, from academics and teachers to community groups and built environment professionals, and found many overlaps. We have limited ourselves to 12 main categories to keep things simple, within which there are around thirty sub-categories. The prototype testing period will allow us to see whether there are any key categories missing—feedback is welcome.

How will you deal with people who may want to disrupt the system? 

Our intention is to cultivate a community which can handle occasional disruption, along the lines of other collaborative online projects. The site will allow anyone to upload and edit data as they like and to go back and forth over the details if necessary. Quantitative data on the building stock is, we hope, not too controversial, other than perhaps for large developments. The locations of utilities’ may be sensitive, but this is not within the main scope of our data collection. For the ‘Like me’ category, users will have only one vote per building.

How do you deal with people who enter ‘wrong’ information.

Like Wikipedia, we as a community will have to keep re-editing, however edit histories will help users see where data comes from, for example if it is uploaded by a specialist body.

What about the spaces in between buildings?

We recognise the importance of this but in the first instance we will only gather data on the buildings themselves. We will however include a sub-category which records a building's position, i.e. mid-terrace, end-of-terrace, semi-detached or detached.

What do you do about multiple uses that the footprint doesn’t record?

We intend to record as many uses per building as necessary.

What if several buildings are represented as a single outline?

We rely on Ordnance Survey MasterMap for our building outlines, so if these are not subdivided, we will need to attach extra data to the single outline, or else consider altering the outlines manually. Some buildings have the opposite problem, where there are multiple polygons for a single building. For example some post-war estates have each of the balconies drawn separately. Our hope is that the project will stimulate discussion with Ordnance Survey regarding a more user friendly open version of the building outlines.

Can this be rolled out to other cities?

Yes, in principal. We hope that Colouring London will act as a proof of concept. We rely on a sufficient set of building outlines to provide the basis for all the building attribute data that we collect—for London, Ordnance Survey and the Greater London Authority have supported us by providing the MasterMap building outlines.

Have you involved OpenStreetMap in the project?

Yes, we had a discussion with OpenStreetMap contributors at an international mapping conference in Leuven last year and would very much like the OpenStreetMap community to become involved in the project. We hope that by generating data of relevance to local areas we will also stimulate increased interest in OpenStreetMap and in collecting building outline polygons as open data.

Will all the data collected be released as open data?

Yes, all the building attributes which we collect will be available under an open data license. However, we are limited by Ordnance Survey data licensing and are not currently able to provide building outlines or geographical coordinates. We will provide sufficient data for MasterMap users to link building attributes to their own copies of the polygons.

How can communities download the data with sufficient spatial information?

We will collect details of building addresses, including postcodes, as a first step towards providing location details. We will also look into the possibility of creating and sharing geographical coordinates for our dataset as open data, as suggested by a contributor, in collaboration with the OpenStreetMap community.