Buildings are becoming a mainstay of basemaps and an increasingly important dataset for planning, civil defence and property management. They tell a story about how our built environment has developed.
In New Zealand, we're capturing building outlines in alignment with our National Aerial Imagery Programme. On behalf of councils and government departments, this programme covers vast areas of aerial imagery each summer. This imagery is then released under the CC-BY 4.0 license on the LINZ Data Service.
Over the past two summers, we've procured building outlines aligned to this aerial imagery, which are also released under the same open license. These building outlines are stored and maintained using QGIS and PostGIS. The dataset currently contains over 2.8 million building outlines.
This toolset includes quality assurance and data maintenance workflows using QGIS and a comparison tool to link representations of the same building outline over time, initially processed with PostGIS and confirmed in QGIS.
For this presentation, we'll go back in time, using the past to show the possibilities that this dataset will provide in the future.