Location: Estonia (national building registry)
Year: 2025–2026 (ongoing)
Sector: Data Engineering · Building Stock · GIS
Turning Estonia’s national building registry into a clean, structured dataset — the kind of unglamorous data plumbing that makes SPIN Unit’s building-use analyses possible in the first place.
SPIN Unit’s building-use and accessibility studies rely on Estonia’s national Ehitisregister (Building Registry) — but that registry’s raw exports aren’t analysis-ready. This project builds and maintains the pipeline that turns them into something usable.
An ongoing technical partnership with TalTech, run in two build cycles roughly eight months apart: an initial GIS-join delivery in early 2025, followed by an October 2025 refresh that added direct API integration as a lighter-weight alternative to bulk file downloads.
Bulk EHR exports covering buildings, building parts, technical data, and usage classifiers are joined by building ID, filtered by construction year and use code (excluding, for instance, cottages), and output as GeoPackages for GIS use — alongside a newer workflow pulling building details directly from the EHR API on demand.
- Covers multiple geographic scopes — Tallinn’s city centre, all of Estonia for buildings first used 2020–2025, and Tallinn building materials specifically.
- The shift from bulk file downloads to direct API calls between the two build cycles is a genuine workflow evolution, not just a repeat delivery.
- Includes deliberate building-typology cleanup — filtering out irrelevant use codes rather than passing raw registry data straight through.
Provides the clean, structured building-stock data underpinning SPIN Unit’s broader Estonian urban analysis work — infrastructure for other projects rather than a standalone deliverable in itself.