Commercial sources of City/Building Data

Sanborn
- CitySets
  - off-the-shelf digital datasets covering the core downtown areas of major cities across the United States, consisting of their traditional maps, digital orthophotos, and 3D building data (attributes include height)
  - pricing is per-layer, per-city
  - e.g. $5k for Boston, $20k for New York for the 'Smart Geographic Info' layer that has the building footprints
- conventional maps
  - Sanborn possesses an amazing series of detailed building maps, almost 1,000,000 documents, created over the last 150 years for fire insurance companies
  - details include building footprints, materials, locations of windows and doors
  - many of the maps have been scanned and are available from Digital Sanborn Maps, but access is limited to libraries and similar institutions which have a license
  - around 25 cities, mostly in the eastern US, have updated maps available for them; the rest are largely of historical value
VisionMedia 3dskylines.com
- Creates and sells 3D urban data sets of cities worldwide.
- As of March 2007, their site lists 7 US cities with textured models, 5 in Australia.
- 20 more US cities and 3 more international are available as polygons models.
- Generally, these are a small part of the city downtown.
3D Spatial Models of Great Buildings
- has a lot of free building models, but they are apparently only distributed in a proprietary format to promote some particular viewer software (DesignWorkshop Lite, which requires extensive manual registration)
MetroBlocks
- provided 3D buildings for 13 cities with "1-meter accuracy", and a web interface for producing a variety of 2D and 3D "maps" utilizing their 3D city models
- the site went away in May 2004, came back in October
MapFactory / Aerotopia 3D Cities
- no longer in business?
i-cubed (i3)
- they sell (or sold?) "Digital City Models" (DCM) with "3D Building Data" for around 20-40 US cities
- they worked with Vexcel for the aerial photogrammetry to acquire the building models
- there is little mention of DCM on the i3 site as of 2008