Import/Catalogue/Los Angeles County Buildings
Los Angeles County building and address import
Proposal to import building perimeter outline and address data by L.A. County GIS and the Los Angeles County Assessor to OpenStreetMap
Introduction
In November 2012, L.A. County opened its dataset of building footprints to the public. This dataset is high quality and would otherwise be hard to collect manually.
From L.A. County GIS: "The Countywide building outline dataset contains building outlines (over 3,000,000) for all buildings in Los Angeles County, including building height, building area, and the parcel number (also known as building footprints). This data was captured from stereo imagery as part of the LAR-IAC2 Project (2008 acquisition)."
Also available are two files to help us merge in address data:
- The L.A. County Assessor's tax roll data, which contains addresses for every parcel in the county. By linking the building to the parcel, we might be able to assign a proper set of addresses to each building.
- The L.A. County Address point file. This is a shapefile that contains address data linked to a point. If these match up with building center points, we could likely merge them to the building shapes. Failing that, part of the import process could be rectifying the point address with the buildings.
This proposal suggests a community supported import of all L.A. County building and address data, reconciling overlaps with OSM data. Not only will we improve OSM data by adding high-quality building shapes -- which are sorely lacking in much of this dense county -- but we have the opportunity to vastly improve geocoding of addresses.
Current status: Proposal
We are currently putting this out as a proposal and invite feedback from interested parties. It is incomplete.
There is a github repo including processing scripts (based on the NYC import) and issue tracking
A larger wiki proposal can be found at Los_angeles,_California/Buildings_Import
Data
- County-wide Building Footprints
- L.A. County Assessor Local Roll for 2013-2014.
- L.A. County Assessor Parcel Shapes
- L.A. County Assessor Address Points file
Inspiration
What it looks like
L.A. County buildings shaded by height
