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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a lookup between postcode and address, what is the abuse cases you're worried about?
Considering that in UK if you live in a building, the door next to you can have a different postcode, I wouldn't worry at all
IIRC, the neighbours to one side in the same building had a third postcode for their front, but shared mine for the back.
I can respect the arguments for making it public but there are strong arguments also to raise a high barrier of entry to discourage abuse. Further, the fewer users of the list, they easier they are to police.
I am a bit surprised by how hard this article makes out the problem to be. Crowdsourcing should make short work of the problem, with the right incentives, which the government will be able to offer. Additionally private map providers (e.g. Google, Apple) must surely have this data (since they are able to route navigation to private addresses). Why not just negotiate with them?
Meanwhile Ireland introduced Éircodes less than 10 years ago, chose an opaque format that uses a central database that you have to pay for access to for anything more than a handful of lookups, only covers homes (so you can’t give an eircode of a park, or a walk). It’s pretty much what you’d expect to be designed by a modern government.
On the other side of the Channel, the French government has managed to create the "BAN" (Base Adresse Nationale - National Address Database), a database of detailed postal addresses in the country along with precise GPS coordinates: https://adresse.data.gouv.fr/base-adresse-nationale On top of the database they have provided an interface to view the data, interfaces for towns and cities to keep the data up-to-date, f…
My address in France is listed in the BAN… but only to the granularity of my street number (e.g., 123 Main St.).
Unfortunately, that number corresponds to at least 7 different structures, 5 of which are apartment buildings.
Of those 5 buildings, each has multiple stairwells with their own door and no line of communication between them—they might as well be separate buildings.
My particular building has 8 levels with 2 flats per level. No flat has a door number or letter, meaning I must say 'Nth floor, door on the right' to give directions to a visitor. And I could not receive mail until I affixed my name to my postbox on the ground level.
None of that is in the BAN as far as I can tell.
Finally, on OpenStreetMap, the coordinate for the the street number address in the BAN actually corresponds to an island in the street that happens to face a private road that enters the property. There is more than one entrance :)
Eircodes are better than postcodes, in that there's 1 per building/address/apartment, however they're discontinuous, so adjacent buildings will have distinctly different eircodes.
The article highlighted the difficulty of shopping centers and apartment buildings, from my experience trying to validate a large number of Eircode addresses for a project, this is definitely an issue. The worse issue is that there's no way to just send someone out to check, because the eircode isn't like a house number that's posted somewhere. (Leaving aside the problem that valid Irish addresses can have no numbers outside of the eircode, and eircodes are a recent, and therefore non-traditional addition)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The British mail addresses are pretty interesting. We quickly learned that, as you say some postcode have just one or two houses, which may not have numbers, but names. I'm sure there is a "falsehoods programmers believe about addresses" somewhere.
https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
But apparently that would make data analysis to complicated.
For non-GB people, a postcode gets you to ~1-15 buildings, not (for example) a town or region.
Most of my street is a single post code. Once upon a time it was a street of single family dwellings, so that's maybe a 3-4 dozen homes, but this is a city suburb so densification means some of those homes were modified and cut up to form flats, one large family home becomes six smaller homes - and some were purchased, knocked down and replaced by buildings which don't look out of place but aren't what they were before. I live in a purpose built four storey block, but it's designed to look superficially like a big house, the bottom floor is below street level (it faces out over the hill), the top has only loft-style windows at the front like somebody did a loft conversion.
It's all still one postcode though, so I share a code with maybe 100+ households. Recoding is disruptive and it's not really worth it, so they mostly don't do it.
Remember for actually delivering the post the postcode is just a convenient human readable part of an address, the machines (with occasional human help) turn any arbitrary address into a unique destination code, and then that's literally barcoded (albeit not in a code you're used to from like UPC etc.) onto the post. So for the Royal Mail the postcodes not being as descriptive as they were fifty years ago isn't a big problem.
Take some mail you've received, preferably over several days and study the outsides carefully. Two fluorescent orange bar codes have been jet printed onto the mail during sorting. The upper code is "just" a temporary unique ID, every piece of mail in the sorting system is issued a code, when they run out they start over, this helps with debugging and statistics. The lower case is in some sense the successor to the postcode, it'll be identical for every item delivered to the same address and distinct for other addresses. In fact it's encoding the "Delivery Point" which is what PAF handles, the location to which the Royal Mail employee delivers mail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM4SCC
The use of these "real" postcodes also enables the Royal Mail to more readily accede to impractical "vanity" postcode requests. If the rich people in this part of Dirt Town think they ought to have postcodes from the adjacent and posh sounding Upper Niceton, RM can allow that, because in reality their teams are working from the purely numeric code which will still treat all these new "Upper Niceton" homes as being where they actually are, in Dirt Town.
For non-GB people, a postcode gets you to ~1-15 buildings, not (for example) a town or region.
The British mail addresses are pretty interesting. We quickly learned that, as you say some postcode have just one or two houses, which may not have numbers, but names. I'm sure there is a "falsehoods programmers believe about addresses" somewhere.
Foo House
Townland
Large town somewhat nearby where the mail comes through but only tangentially near the actual house
County Bar
There's a bank address in my town: PTSB Kennedy Road Navan Co Meath
Kennedy Road is about 2 blocks long with ~ 30 shop fronts, and there are numbers on all but one of them.