Import/Orange County, California Buildings
This is a plan for the addition of building footprint with address data for Orange County, California. This effort is building on previous imports that were successfully completed earlier this year for the City of Redlands, California and City of Flagstaff, Arizona, using data preparation procedures developed for those efforts and refined based on OSM community feedback, with a different process for mappers to add the features to OSM (see Data Updates section below). For a list of other Esri-curated datasets that are available for mapping, please see Esri ArcGIS Datasets.
Goals
The goal of this effort is to add the Orange County, California Buildings data to effectively complete the coverage of building footprints for the County, using authoritative data from the County. OSM currently has partial coverage (less than 100,000) of the 750,000+ buildings in the County. This effort would greatly enhance the coverage of buildings for the county, while retaining the many buildings already added to OSM. The Orange County buildings also include full address and height information that will be added as tags. In a future phase, we will plan to update existing buildings to include additional address tags where needed.
Schedule
Data preparation was performed in May 2020, with updates performed in June 2022. The edits to OSM would likely be performed incrementally over the remainder of 2020, starting no sooner than mid-July.
Source
The latest update of the source building footprints were downloaded in May 2022 from the ArcGIS Hub Open Data site.
The processed building footprints are available to access on ArcGIS Online (see Orange County, CA Buildings).
OSM ODbL Compliance: Yes, the Orange County data is provided under a CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication.
Data Preparation
The processed building footprints referenced above were created using these Esri Data Processing Steps for Buildings and Addresses, developed and refined while doing data prep for several city and county communities in the United States. Below are a couple notes specific to the Orange County buildings data.
- The processed building footprints data contains 781,222 buildings.
- The processed building footprints data includes address tags (i.e. housenumber, street, unit, city, state, postcode) and height tag (with value in feet, such as 32'), as well as a building tag (with value of "yes" only).
Data Conflation
Existing building features in OSM will not be replaced. The plan is to perform the the updates in phases. In the first phase, only new buildings that do not intersect existing buildings will be added. In future phases, existing OSM buildings may be downloaded and updated to include additional address tags.
Data Updates
The plan is to perform the initial phase of updates using a updated version of RapiD and an updated Map with AI plugin for JOSM (see Esri blog post on new tools in OSM editors for more detail). The new tools will enable OSM mappers to access ArcGIS Datasets hosted in ArcGIS Online and select individual features to use while editing OSM. The mapper will be able to select a feature, review and edit the feature geometry and available fields, and then save their edits.
The mapper will have the benefit of using existing features that have been created by the data provider, along with their available field values that have been pre-processed by Esri, while also being able to compare that feature with existing OSM data (e.g. street names) and imagery to ensure it is accurate and consistent. The data source used for the edit will be added as a tag to each feature that is saved as part of a changeset.
Accounts
The plan is for most OSM mappers to use their standard OSM accounts if they are editing with RapiD and JOSM editors for OSM and editing individual features. However, if Esri staff do any 'bulk' edits where we do not examine individual features, then we will create and use new dedicated import accounts (e.g. <username>_orange_county_import) for those changesets. We encourage other OSM mappers to do the same.