

Ask HN: Emergency, where can I find building footprints for Kent County, MI? - philsalesses

Hey HN,<p>We paid a county for some GIS data, thinking it would be great, but it's complete garbage. Now we have 11 days to deliver our product to a utility in Michigan but we don't even know where to find the data we need.<p>We need building footprints for Kent County, MI along with their street addresses. Primarily we're looking for Grand Rapids and some of Wisconsin, MI, but if someone had access to this data, we'd like Kent County entirely just to be safe.<p>Does anyone know anybody who would be able to provide this, or help us find someone that can? I know Google, Nokia, Bing and a bunch of other companies have the data, but I doubt they are willing to sell it to us. Although if they did, that would be awesome.<p>Any ideas? I'm trying everything.<p>Thanks in advance, Phil
======
toast0
If you can do it with Open Street maps, that's probably the best (but do be
prepared for the licensing terms), for buildings it seems like the building
tag would be helpful <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:building>

EG <http://preview.tinyurl.com/bfc65yl>

If that looks about right, I'd get the Michigan extract
[http://downloads.cloudmade.com/americas/northern_america/uni...](http://downloads.cloudmade.com/americas/northern_america/united_states/michigan)
and use Osmfilter to pull out only the ways with a building tag.

If that doesn't look promising, you probably want to talk to Navteq (now part
of nokia); they're a major source of the data that everyone else uses, it
looks like there's some sample data here
[http://sampledata.navteq.com/site/global/developer_resources...](http://sampledata.navteq.com/site/global/developer_resources/sample_data/p_sample_data.jsp)
and probably you can find contact info from there somehow

------
brudgers
Based on the image for "Printable Maps" on this page:

<http://www.accesskent.com/YourGovernment/Departments/GIS/>

Kent County's GIS department has such data. However, the exercise of reading
and interpreting their database schema is likely to range from non-trivial to
well nigh impossible depending on the heritage of the data, the applications
used to create it, and the quality of the available documentation.

Based on Kent County's requirement of Silverlight for viewing their
interactive map online, there is at least some hope. It could have been
AutoDesk Map Viewer.

------
willidiots
I've used EGS for this sort of thing before. Not sure if they cover that area.

<http://www.egstech.com/geodata/buildingheights.html>

------
Geee
You can make them yourselves with Open Street map tools, good satellite images
and Amazon Mechanical Turk. :)

Of course, you should definitely ask some of those map providers first.

