Why is there no worldwide OSM building coverage in LAOW?

[SeanGrant3]

We are trying to build an app using the JSAPI and want to have worldwide coverage of buildings. In order to show them in 3D we have to access the FeatureLayer since we cannot extrude the vector tile buildings from MapBox (which is worldwide) since Esri does not support that (as asked here: fill-extrusion Vector Tile Layer style gives an error: unknown vector tile layer ). If you search in the Living Atlas for OSM Buildings you only get authoritative data for North America, Central America and Africa. 

Is there another worldwide service we could use or a workaround for the vector tile fill-extrusion functionality? Are there plans to add the rest of world to LAOW?

[MarcoBoeringa]

Although I cannot speak for ESRI as a fellow user like you, I think the blog post ESRI made about the feature layers, at least partly explains it:

Live OpenStreetMap data in ArcGIS 

There are two things mentioned there: the suggestion they used the Geofabrik regional extracts to do the initial load for their databases, and that, in order to support minutely updates, they had to work with these continental sized extracts instead of the whole planet to make it work with the current infrastructure they have available ("In order to support timely updates of the data..."). I think they may have run into some technical limitations here.

As I have processed data myself for the whole of Europe, I know some of the challenges involved. All of Europe's buildings already amounts to close to 180M features! And some 35 GB disk size when exported to File Geodatabase from my PostgreSQL instance. It can be handled from one database, but there may be limitations regarding AGOL (I personally have little experience with using AGOL except accessing already available layers there).

[StevenMoore1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Sean,

For now we're publishing OSM data on a regional basis for scalability and performance reasons. However, that could change at some point in the future once we're out of beta.

As you noted, the regions currently available are North America, Africa, and Central America. Europe is being worked on right now and should be available in the next 2-3 weeks. After that we plan to have the remaining regions up and running within the next few months.

The blog that Marco linked to also has some good information, but feel free to reply here with any further questions or feedback.

Thanks,

Steve