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Colouring Dresden

Colouring Dresden logo
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Contributions to the community: - FAIR: Provides openly licensed, machine-readable micro-spatial building data with standardized attribute schemas and metadata to improve findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability - Standards and workflows: Uses CCRP protocols and expert data groups to harmonize attribute definitions, data capture methods, and validation workflows across national platforms.
- Quality assurance: Integrates data provenance, source links, edit history, moderated uploads, and planned uncertainty quantification; validates inferred datasets to ensure footprint and attribute consistency.
- Reuse and impact: Adopted and extended by academic hubs across >30 countries; supports research on SDGs, energy planning, disaster response, and urban policy; enables reproducible analyses and cross-country comparisons.
- Societal engagement: Enables citizen science and local stakeholder participation while applying ethical guardrails and privacy-preserving practices.

Project Overview

Colouring Dresden is the first implementation of the Colouring Cities Research Programme (CCRP) in Germany. CCRP is an open, academic led network of interactive national platforms that collates, standardizes, and shares micro spatial building stock data to support SDG relevant research, policy, and public engagement. The global CCRP network connects academic hubs across countries and provides CCRP protocols, shared code, and expert groups to harmonize schemas, validation workflows, and privacy best practices.

Operated by IOER, Colouring Dresden uses a web map interface to enable volunteers, local experts, students, and researchers to annotate building footprints with standardized attributes (e.g., construction year, primary materials, typology, renovation status, energy features, damage state). Data collection pathways include: moderated bulk uploads of official or institutional datasets; live/near real time ingestion from official APIs; citizen science contributions via guided mapping events and crowd editing; and computationally inferred attributes produced by AI/ML workflows. All submissions include provenance metadata, edit histories, and source links to support assessment of fitness for purpose.

The platform emphasizes transparency, reproducibility, and ethics: code, documentation, and methods are published openly (CCRP GitHub), datasets are released under open database licences, and privacy safeguards prevent release of personal or interior data. Colouring Dresden will contribute German case studies, tools, and validation results to the CCRP network, helping to scale interoperable national instances and informing cross country analyses on urban resilience, energy transition, and heritage conservation.

Colouring Dresden
Media 2: Colouring Dresden.

Colouring Dresden: - Colouring Dresden project landing page: https://colouring.dresden.ioer.info - Colouring Dresden platform: https://colouring.dresden.ioer.de/ - Colouring Dresden Dashboard: https://colouring.dresden.ioer.de/dashboard/d/cewzrz2xqgow0e/ - Colouring Dresden GitHub: https://github.com/colouring-cities/colouring-dresden - Data extract: Hecht, Robert, Tabea Danke, und Theodor Rieche. "Crowd-sourced collected building attributes of the Colouring Dresden project (from 06 March 2023 to 01 October 2023) (1.0)" [Data set]. Zenodo, 2024. https://doi.org/10.26084/ioerfdz-data-de-2024-1.

Global network resources: - Colouring Cities Research Programme (CCRP): https://colouringcities.org/
- CCRP GitHub (core code, manuals, plugins): https://github.com/colouring-cities

Digital Educational Resources on Wikiversity: - https://de.wikiversity.org/wiki/Projekt:Colouring_Dresden

Selected Publications

  • Hecht, R.; Hudson, P.; Gavaldà, O.; Hawas, A.; Palaiologou, F.; Herold, H.; Larimian, T. (2025): Colouring Cities: A network of open platforms to improve the availability of data on the building stock for research, government and society. In: 28th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science. Dresden: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15336081
  • Danke, T.; Hecht, R.; Rieche, T. (2024): Closing knowledge gaps on the building stock with citizen science: introducing the Colouring Dresden platform. In: ARPHA Proceedings, 6, 159-164. https://doi.org/10.3897/ap.e125607
  • Hudson, P. (2018). Urban characterisation: Expanding applications for, and new approaches to building attribute data capture. The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice, 9(3–4), 306–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/17567505.2018.1542776
  • Hecht, R.; Danke, T.; Herold, H.; Hudson, P.; Munke, M.; Rieche, T. (2023): Colouring Cities: A Citizen Science Platform for Knowledge Production on the Building Stock - Potentials for Urban and Architectural History. In: Münster, S.; Pattee, A.; Kröber, C.; Niebling, F. (eds.): Research and Education in Urban History in the Age of Digital Libraries. Third International Workshop, UHDL 2023, Munich, Germany, March 27-28, 2023, Revised Selected Papers. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1853. Cham: Springer, 145-164. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38871-2_9