Buildings Canada contains representations of building footprints that are enriched with detailed characteristics such as area, centroid latitude and longitude, building type, and elevation. Companies that use building data in their daily operations realize new ways to enhance capabilities, improve services, and aid in use cases such as:
Insurance
- Identifying the location of a building can validate the placement of insured structures within a parcel, helping to understand exposure to risks such as wildfire, fault lines, and shoreline proximity
- Performing analyses of building proximity to fire stations, police stations, and crime-prone areas to determine which properties to insure, and to provide appropriate premium rates
- Assessing affected properties after a risk event to estimate total loss
- Managing policies in force by understanding over- or under-concentration of policies in high-risk areas
- Identifying fraudulent claims
Telecommunications
- Updating service areas by identifying serviceable locations for unserved or underserved properties, providing potential for increased subscribership, or extension of new services to existing customers
- Performing network planning and managing assets by using building footprint shapes and densities to optimize signal coverage, identify obstructions for microwave- or millimeter-wave networks, and determining how signals will penetrate buildings based on construction data
- Performing risk modeling and assessing the vulnerability of network infrastructure to ensure resilience during weather risk events
- Reducing the costs of expensive on-site physical inspections