GIS Resources

Building/Structures Data

Canada

• Open Database of Buildings - collection of open data on buildings from eight provinces, primarily building footprints (does not include Calgary)

• Statistics Canada - metadata document

• Automatically Extracted Buildings - from Natural Resources Canada, vector building footprints extracted from airborne LiDAR data, high-resolution optical imagery or other sources; includes height and elevation. Includes Calgary.

• Computer generated building footprints for Canada - from Microsoft. 12,663,475 building footprint polygon geometries from all Canadian provinces and territories in GeoJSON format. (does include Calgary). A good post on working with GeoJSON in ArcMAP and QGIS.

United States

• US Building Footprints from Microsoft - New York Times article about the database

• National Zoning Atlas - The National Zoning Atlas aims to depict key aspects of zoning codes in an online, user-friendly map. Some states provide downloadable data.

International

• Open Buildings - from Google, currently only Africa. A dataset of building footprints to support social good applications.

• Global Building Footprints from Microsoft

• EUBUCCO - a scientific database of individual building footprints for 200+ million buildings across the 27 European Union countries and Switzerland, together with three main attributes – building type, height and construction year – included for respectively 45%, 74%, 24% of the buildings. EUBUCCO is composed of 50 open government datasets and OpenStreetMap that have been collected, harmonized and partly validated.