[OSM-newbies] Neighborhood detail

[Andrew Salzberg]

I really support mapping building footprints - but I'm a newbie so anyone
feel free to correct me.

My sense is the reason larger areas aren't done are for the reasons you
suggest - it's hard, and tedious. For some areas - notably Washington, DC -
the GIS department of the city has shared all building footprints and the
license was compatible with OSM - and so you'll see that data is there for
Washington, DC.

On the other hand, even cities that share their data for building
footprints like New York City don't seem to have the building footprints in
OSM - I'm guessing this is a licensing issue but I don't know the details.

One thing I've been working to do - that really does need some 'on the
ground work' is trying to put building heights into some of the footprints
- even those uploaded by somewhere like DC. I've started to do this in DC.
(side note: i'm doing this b/c i'm a land use/transport planner and really
interested in comparing density around transit stops across the US and the
world - and OSM seems an ideal way to do that).  I've been using
building:levels tag to do that (for # floors) but building:height (in m) is
probably more popular (but less useful for my particular purposes).

so if i can put in a plug - do enter building footprints, and do add number
of stories (and ideally try and do one whole area with 800m near a transit
stop so we can compare/contrast results with the ones I'm doing :) )

Andrew

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 2:36 PM, Stephen Johnson <earthstephen at yahoo.com>wrote:

> I thought it would be a good start in OSM to improve the mapping of my own
> neighborhood. I have worked on the road alighnmets, adding bridges etc. I
> also started adding addresses. I am pretty sure these are all good things
> to do. One thing I have started that I am not sure of is adding building
> outlines for all the houses for which that is possible based on the Bing
> Satellite images. I have looked around in some larger cities (not an
> extensive search though) and haven't seen any buildings outlined in
> residential neighborhood only in more commercial districts. Is there some
> reason I should not do this? Maybe it hasn't been done because it doesn't
> add much useful information but is labor intensive? It is a bit tedious but
> I figured if everyone just did their own neighborhood, large areas could be
> done. Any thoughts?
>
>
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