USA building outline inventory from FEMA, ORNL

General talk
1

FEMA, DHS, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and U.S. Geological Survey collaborated to create this data set for US buildings:

Here’s a paper about it in Nature’s “Scientific Data”:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-024-03219-x

According to this blog post, OpenStreetMap data was also used in this project:

Can any of this resulting data be brought into OpenStreetMap to fill in buildings that aren’t yet traced here?

2

It is my understanding that work produced by the US Government is in the public domain. If I am correct, then it is likely that we can use this data.

However, I’d prefer to defer to someone a bit more knowledgeable about this data.

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Thanks for sharing!

Checked into the data quality using some known sites- very generalized building shapes verging on inaccurate; missing buildings (houses) entirely. Not a replacement for manual mapping and validation unfortunately.

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Thanks for doing this! I know that such detailed checking can be a lot of work.