[Imports-us] Baltimore Building Outlines Import

[Matthew Petroff]

Hello,

The City of Baltimore provides a large amount of public domain GIS data through
their data portal [1]. Included are city wide building footprints [2], which I
would like to import into OpenStreetMap. Other users have already started
importing this data in a less automated way. I confirmed with the city GIS
office that the data is indeed public domain.

Using QGIS, I assigned approximate street addresses to each building using a
parcel map [3] and used the field calculator to clean up the labels and remove
abbreviations. In addition, I removed all data that intersected with existing
buildings to preserve existing work. I then separated the data into smaller
chunks and converted the Shapefiles to OSM with Merkaartor. After simplifying
Merkaartor's output using osmconvert's "--drop-author" switch, I tagged the
data with sed, before finally using JOSM to remove duplicate vertices and empty
tags. My only qualm with the data is that some buildings have more nodes than
they need, but I'm not sure what can be done about it besides manually reviewing
and simplifying all 200k+ outlines.

I've currently tagged the data with:
building=yes
addr:city=Baltimore
addr:state=MD
addr:country=US
addr:inclusion=estimate
source=Baltimore City GIS
addr:housenumber=[Based on parcel data]
addr:street=[Based on parcel data]

I've uploaded the files here for feedback:
http://db.tt/P9qh1hIm

Thoughts, suggestions, questions?


-Matthew Petroff



[1] https://data.baltimorecity.gov/
[2] https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Geographic/Building-Footprint-Shape/deus-s85f
[3] https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Geographic/Parcels-Shape/jk3c-vrfy