Canada Structures: A Vector Database of Building Footprints from Three National Sources

Canada Structures is a vector database of existing structure data sources in Canada. The product is provided in vector format and was created by Public Safety Canada. It was last updated on April 9, 2026.

Use Cases

• Conducting national-scale risk and vulnerability assessments based on building location data.
• Analyzing urban density and development patterns by integrating data from three different building footprint sources.
• Creating base maps for emergency response and planning using the provided vector format.
• Comparing and validating building footprint data from OpenStreetMap, Microsoft, and the Open Data Base of Buildings.

Strengths

• Integrates three major building footprint data sources: ODB, OSM, and Microsoft.
• Data is provided in a vector format suitable for GIS analysis.
• Has a suggested citation and a DOI (10.82126/z1bc-zd72) for academic use.
• Last updated on 2026-04-09, indicating recent maintenance.

Limitations

• Row count, file size, and column definitions are unknown, limiting suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic or source bias inherent to the three contributing datasets.

Provenance

Source

Public Safety Canada (PS).

Collection Method

Aggregated from the Open Data Base of Buildings (ODB), OpenStreetMap (OSM) buildings, and Microsoft Building Footprints (MSB).

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-09 16:37:54.483851; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Canada