Data too huge to access: Bing Australia Building Footprints

Question

I am relatively inexperienced with QGIS. I seeking to access building footprints in a 20km radius from the centre of Melbourne city, Australia.

The dataset I am hoping to use is Bing's 2020 Australia Building Footprint collection that is located here and can be downloaded here.

The problem I'm encountering is that the unzipped file is a 6+ gb large GeoJSON file, with from what I understand that has no layers, just polygon data. The file covers all of Australia and is too large clearly to large to open straight up in QGIS.

How can I view, filter or trim the data down to access the selection I would like.

Answer 1

Building :) on BERA's answer, you could use ogr2ogr to select just buildings within a 20km buffer of Melbourne using a sqlite sql query.

I would still load all buildings to a geopackage first to take advantage of the spatial indexing, then select out Melbourne buildings.

The below SQL statement assumes Melbourne lon, lat is 144.9631,-37.8136, makes a point, reprojects to VicGrid 94 (EPSG:3111), buffers by 20km, projects the buffer back to WGS84 (EPSG:4326) and uses that buffer to select any building polys that intersect it.

ogr2ogr Australia.gpkg Australia.geojson Australia
ogr2ogr -update -dialect sqlite -sql "select * from Australia a where Intersects(a.geom, Transform(Buffer(Transform(MakePoint(144.9631,-37.8136, 4326), 3111),  20000), 4326))" -nln Melbourne Australia.gpkg Australia.gpkg

Answer 2

Large geojson files can be extremly slow to open and display in QGIS. You can convert it to a geopackage using ogr2ogr which will open alot quicker.

My environmental variables are broken so I specify full path to the executable but for you it might be enough with just ogr2ogr.

C:\OSGeo4W\bin\ogr2ogr.exe C:\GIS\GIStest\buildings_sweden.gpkg C:\GIS\GIStest\buildings_sweden.geojson -lco SPATIAL_INDEX=YES

I believe spatial index creation is default, I just added it to be sure.

When you've opened the geopackage in QGIS you can Select the features you want to keep, right-click and export selected features to a new file.