[Talk-us-massachusetts] Map of every building in the US

[Greg Troxel]

"Alan & Ruth Bragg" <alan.ruth.bragg at gmail.com> writes:

> The New York Times recently publish an article about Microsoft's release to
> the public  building footprints
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/12/us/map-of-every-building-in-the-united-states.html

> There's a potential here to add missing buildings to Massachusetts. We just
> need to figure out a simple process.

Given the existing buildings, I don't think it can be that simple :-(

The basic idea would be to write code that compares buildings in the MS
data set, and sorts them into

  - closely matches an existing building
  - overlaps or is really near, but doesn't match
  - not near an existing building

and then have a look at the 'not near' buildings and see what we think.

I am guessing that in places where they did this there are not lots of
existing buildings.

Also, there have been updates to the massgis buildings layer.  But, many
"buildings" that were added in the import have been removed as either
not being buildings or having been physically removed, so we need a way
to ensure that an import does not re-add these hand-mapper-removed
buildings.

So once again it needs someone to load things (postgis or something
that's like that but isn't postgis) and write code to analyze/sort.

Do you have a link to their wiki page that was used for import review?