Thanks to some excellent feedback from the community, the #DigitizeRacine project is moving forward with great efficiency.

Microsoft’s building footprints seem to be fairly accurate for Racine County, and often only need minor corrections, or a garage or two added.

In refining my landuse areas, I came across a few areas with no sidewalk. I went looking for a parcel map to reference, and came across the WI State Cartographer’s V4 Parcel dataset. Not only does this give me the parcel boundaries I wanted, but it includes address information, and is freely available for public use.

So, after a bit of pre-processing, I’ve joined the parcel address information to Microsoft’s building footprints, then split the resulting layer into a few thousand manageable chunks. I’ve always liked the task management method that HOTOSM uses. I grab a section or two, work on those to completion, cross them off the list.

At this point, I think the focus will shift towards the building footprints, as those are currently not in the OSM dataset. Whatever my opinions on landuse areas, those are already present, and refining existing data can wait. Adding buildings with accurate address tags is now the primary task; landuse will be the next phase. The state parcel layer also includes some zoning tags, which may be helpful in determining landuse areas.