Import/City of Johns Creek, Georgia Buildings

This is a plan for the addition of building footprint with address data for the City of Johns Creek, Georgia. This effort is building on previous imports that were successfully completed earlier this year for the City of Redlands, California and City of Flagstaff, Arizona, using data preparation procedures developed for those efforts and refined based on OSM community feedback, with a different process for mappers to add the features to OSM (see Data Updates section below). For a list of other Esri-curated datasets that are available for mapping, please see Esri ArcGIS Datasets.

Goals

The goal of this effort is to add the City of Johns Creek, Georgia Buildings data to effectively complete the coverage of building footprints for the City, using authoritative data from the City. OSM currently has partial coverage (less than 5,000) of the 24,000+ buildings in the City. This effort would greatly enhance the coverage of buildings for the city, while retaining the many buildings already added to OSM. The City of Johns Creek buildings also include address information that can be added as tags. In a future phase, we will plan to update existing buildings to include additional address tags where needed.

Schedule

Data preparation was performed in August 2020. The edits to OSM would be performed incrementally by OSM mappers over the remainder of 2020 and 2021, starting no sooner than early-November after data is reviewed by the community.

Source

The source building footprints were downloaded in August 2020 from the Johns Creek Open Data Hub.

The processed building footprints that could be added to OSM are available to access on ArcGIS Online (see City of Johns Creek, GA Buildings). You can Open in Map Viewer to preview (click features to view tags) or sign in to export data for offline use.

OSM ODbL Compliance: Yes, the City of Johns Creek data is provided under a CC-BY 4.0 license, with explicit waiver for use in OpenStreetMap as defined by LWG.

Data Preparation

The processed building footprints referenced above were created using these Esri Data Processing Steps for Buildings and Addresses, developed and refined while doing data prep for several city and county communities in the United States. Below are a couple notes specific to the City of Johns Creek buildings data.

• The processed building footprints data contains 24,480 buildings, of which 20,153 buildings did not intersect an existing building in OSM at the time of final data prep and have been made available through the layer to add to OSM.
• The processed building footprints data includes address tags (i.e. housenumber, street, unit, city, state, postcode) and levels tag, as well as a building tag with multiple values (e.g. house, apartments, commercial, etc.).

Data Conflation

Existing building features in OSM will not be replaced. The plan is to perform the updates in phases. In the first phase, only new buildings that do not intersect existing buildings will be added. In future phases, existing OSM buildings may be downloaded and updated to include additional address tags.

Data Updates

The plan is to perform the initial phase of updates using a new version of RapiD and an updated Map with AI plugin for JOSM (see Esri blog post on new tools in OSM editors for more detail). The new tools will enable OSM mappers to access ArcGIS Datasets hosted in ArcGIS Online and select individual features to use while editing OSM. The mapper will be able to select a feature, review and edit the feature geometry and available fields, and then save their edits.

The mapper will have the benefit of using existing features that have been created by the data provider, along with their available field values that have been pre-processed by Esri, while also being able to compare that feature with existing OSM data (e.g. street names) and imagery to ensure it is accurate and consistent. The data source used for the edit will be added as a tag to each feature that is saved as part of a changeset.

Accounts

The plan is for most OSM mappers to use their standard OSM accounts if they are editing with RapiD and JOSM editors for OSM and editing individual features. However, if Esri staff were to do any 'bulk' edits where we do not examine individual features, then we will create and use new dedicated import accounts (e.g. <username>_johnscreek_import) for those changesets. We encourage other OSM mappers to do the same.