OpenHistoricalMap/Projects/Denmark/BBR

Bygnings- og Boligregistret (BBR)

The Danish building and housing registry. This is a registry of all buildings in Denmark that is continuously updated as buildings are constructed and demolished. It was first created in 1977 when the initial data was sourced from building owners. The data is owned by wikipedia:da:Vurderingsstyrelsen, a part of the Danish tax administration.

Download

• Data export using EU INSPIRE data model: https://dataforsyningen.dk/data/3829 This is currently available as a wikipedia:GeoPackage that can be accessed without needing to create a user account. This dataset likely has most, if not all of the data that would be useful to OHM.
• Data exports and query APIs are available from Datafordeler providing data under the native data model. It might be possible to extract some additional data from this dataset and it might be possible to extract information about buildings that have been demolished between 1977 and today.

The data is also available for browsing through the map UI at https://kort.bbr.dk

Relevance for OHM

Most importantly for OHM, the data contains a field indicating when a building was constructed. This field is provided for almost 5 million existing buildings. Some additional details include building height and levels which could be used to fill in building:levels=* and height=*.

The dataset does not include building boundary polygons but only provides a single point within the building boundary. For this reason, the dataset is probably not a good candidate for an automated import, though the data license might also prevent this. There is a separate dataset from GeoDanmark containing building polygons which is licensed under CC-BY-4.0.

Data quality

For the year of construction, a few instances of bogus data (like 1000 as the year) appear in the dataset but mostly this is populated with data that is exactly as stated in other sources or only off by a few years, or otherwise correctly marked as missing. Some cases were found where the year appears to be rounded to nearest century, such as using 1800 for a year that is unknown but estimated to be in the 1800s. For this reason, suspicion should be raised for years that end in "00" or "0".

License

License is available through a link at [1]. This is not public domain or CC0 but still a "worldwide, free, non-exclusive" license. The text affirms that data can me modified, reused, published, for commercial and non-commercial uses. This seems safe to cite for the relevant properties when no other source is readily available.

OHM Tagging using the INSPIRE data

Suggested source tags to use when adding building details that are derived from the INSPIRE export (replace the date with the latest export):

source=Bygnings- og Boligregisteret (BBR). Vurderingsstyrelsen. INSPIRE export 2025-12-12
source:url=https://dataforsyningen.dk/data/3829

• start_date=*: Use the value in the field dateOfConstruction_dateOfEvent_anyPoint (beware of some bogus or inaccurate data as mentioned above).
• building:levels=*: Use the value in the field numberOfFloorsAboveGround.
• height=*: Use the value in the field heightAboveGround_value.

To make it easier to link this back to the BBR data in the future, a ref=* can be added. In the INSPIRE dataset, the best field for this is probably inspireId_localId since the UUID in this field matches the UUID used as the building ID in the native BBR data model:

• ref:DK:BBR_building_id=* (contents of inspireId_localId)