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Canada’s national statistics agency is testing the power of crowdsourcing through an unusual project that aims to map Ottawa’s buildings.

As part of its pilot project, Statistics Canada is asking people who live in Ottawa-Gatineau to contribute information about local buildings to an open source map. Theproject was launched online last month.

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“We’re going to see whether crowdsourcing can be used as an additional tool of data collection,” said Alessandro Alasia, chief of the Data Exploration and Integration Lab at Statistics Canada. “We’re in an exploratory phase. At this point, it’s not going to replace any of our traditional surveying.”

Statistics Canada has partnered with a popular open source platform, OpenStreetMap, to map the location and physical attributes of both public and private buildings in Ottawa-Gatineau. Among other things, the agency wants to know the size of each building, whether it’s residential or commercial and what kind of stores or shops it holds.