By Jinal Foflia
Statistics Canada is collaborating with the OpenStreetMap community to build a single inventory of the location and attributes of every building in Canada. Mapbox is proudly supporting this pilot project in Ottawa and Gatineau, where they have added 233,000 buildings since October 2016!
The national statistics agency for Canada produces analysis that helps Canadians better understand their country — its population, resources, economy, society, and culture. Location and economic use of buildings are useful source data for statistical analysis, but geographic data on buildings in Canada is either distributed among municipalities and provinces or, in some areas, does not exist at all.
Engaging citizens directly for official statistics work is unusual — Statistics Canada is pioneering this new approach. Statistics Canada worked with the City of Ottawa to open building footprint and address data, reviewed the data license with the OpenStreetMap Foundation licensing working group, and coordinated with the passionate local OpenStreetMap community on the import. The initial results with OpenStreetMap as a commons for building data across Canada are promising.
Getting up early in the morning from Bangalore to support the Ottawa OpenStreetMap community.
Mapbox has happily supported the effort by customizing the iD editor, sponsoring mapping events in Ottawa, and providing technical advice on OpenStreetMap data analysis and mapping workflows.
This fall, Statistics Canada is co-hosting the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Summit in Ottawa, focusing on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Collection and analysis of data for the SDGs is lead by national statistics agencies across the globe, and we are excited to see Statistics Canada share their novel approach in Ottawa. Meet the team there to learn more, and get started with OpenStreetMap to add even more detail to buildings in Canada.
Government and citizens collaborate to map Canada was originally published in Points of Interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.