Bing, a search engine owned my Microsoft has made substantial investments in fields like deep learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) to support innumerable search scenarios. The Mapping team at BING has been continuously applying these techniques in order to increase the footprints available for OpenStreetMap.
Taking things further, Bing announced in 2018 the release of 124 million building tracks in the United States to the entire the OpenStreetMap community. The approach led to the creation of 124,885,597 footprints solely in the US from 30,567,953 building footprints.
Bing Maps might not be the default choice for most of the people who use geo-locational resources as compared to other mapping applications, the most prominent being Google Maps. But, when considering investigative results for the open data public / community it would not only be an injustice but also hard to refute the progressions in computer vision and geospatial intelligence the team at Bing have achieved.
With the success results of USA, the Bing team in a collaboration with Statistics Canada recently provided a 12 million building footprint to the Open Data community. This apparently included the visual mapping of buildings across the entire Canadian Provinces and Communities.
Canada has a much larger geographic area, it is very different in biomes and has different types of terrains. It was essential for the team to adapt to a rather different data sets thus, proving both the overview and the scalability of the solutions. This required a momentous performance boost, new training methods as well as reskilling for varied resolutions of imagery.
Since, this is an open data, this means that the entire map of building footprints is available to all Canadians who wish to understand not only their country but also its demographics in a much better and precise way.
Constructing footprints mostly allows to integrate open data from civic, county and district governments so that they are able to meet the needs of official statistics.
A better understanding of this open data would eventually lead to or make a path to make better policy decisions across both private and public sectors.
Bing’s Building Footprints are much more than just mapping of the buildings that exist along the roads. The footprints are useful in the identification of even those buildings that the people were not even aware of their existence. These buildings can be located on those roads or paths that might not appear on records or those routes that don’t connect to any road networks.
Satellite and aerial images have proved to be a much better source of information in comparison to maps that showed incomplete data. Satellite images are constantly being updated and can be relied thoroughly. The regular updates can quickly add new constructions in the data base unlike the old-fashioned style of mapping that can never catch up as new grounds are created across the country. With the data being live, open and available to download for everyone, the team at Bing helps Canadians to ensure all demographics are included. This data can be used not only by common citizens but also governments, NGOs and educational institutions can take advantage of the findings.
