I am completely new, I see alot of missing buildings and houses in Iowa cities (ottumwa, fairfield, libertyville, burlington, etc.) and am wondering if there is a public source to map all of this efficiently, currently am interested in Fairfield. Any help available? I am way out of my league, but also for personal reasons I would love to see this come into fruition. Google AI is telling me that “the State of Iowa has official open-license GIS building footprint,” but of course I am unsure on how to even use it successfully or if it is even true or useable at all. Any help would be much appreciated.
You can map the outlines of the buildings yourself. There’s a tutorial to walk you through the process. Jefferson County maintains GIS maps here:
OpenStreetMap on general favors quality over quantity in terms of mapped building footprints.
End user mapping apps are expected to augment the accurate OSM building footprints with lower quality data sources for areas without mapped buildings.
In the Netherlands buildings are imported from a government database
It is quite some work to keep that up to date and I think the majority of the feedback forms for this government building data is coming from mappers.