[Imports] Addition of building footprints in selected U.S. and Canadian cities

[Ian Dees]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 2:39 PM, William Morris <wboykinm at geosprocket.com>wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> Some colleagues at the UVM Spatial Analysis Lab have offered to submit
> features to OSM that are derived from their high-res (1 meter) LULC
> analyses at locations throughout the U.S. and around Toronto
> (locations here: http://g.co/maps/h9qfx). Their work was primarily
> intended to map urban tree canopy, but they've captured various
> impervious surfaces as well, including excellent building footprints.
>
> Here's an example near UMD of current OSM coverage vs. UVM-SAL
> coverage: http://flic.kr/p/bseokW
>
> Unless there is a tremendous need for tree canopy coverage in OSM, I
> think it would be most useful to add just buildings, and possibly
> parking, both of which are separable feature-by-feature. I'd be happy
> to screen the imports for conflicts with existing OSM features, and to
> bias toward those existing features in all cases.
>
> Given that this is an import of several thousand features, what is the
> best way to proceed?


Building footprints are interesting and we an talk about importing them a
bit more, but can you describe how they were derived? It looks like there
was some classification algorithm used to spot tree cover, parking, roads,
and buildings. Is the building detection fast
enough/compartmentalized-enough to be thrown into an editor plugin so we
could do that automatically from within our editors?

As far as importing, can you describe what format the files are in
currently? Exactly which areas do they cover? Have you looked at those
areas to see if there is existing data?
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