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We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

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Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#91

Post by yard2010 »

GJim wrote: post #21
cuonic wrote: post #10

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…

> GPS coordinates *coordinates There are four GNSS constellations, of which GPS is only one...... a statement that negates the fact ones position on Earth may be calculated using a variety of other means. EDIT: In response to replies below; One isn't questioning the coordinate system (!), rather the assumption as to how they have been calculated.

Fun fact: the word Νερό (nero) means water in greek. The actual meaning is fresh (I think it's the source of the word "new" too). It turns out, that many years ago you meant something else than fresh water by saying just water, so you have to be specific when you're talking about fresh water. In ancient greek water is ὕδωρ (hudr, think hydro, water) and fresh water is νεαρὸν ὕδωρ (neron hudr). Sometime in the past, the ancient Greeks were sick of saying 2 words to say water. So they dropped the second one.

Something similar happens with GPS coordinates. People are just saying GPS when they mean coordinates. even though the logical thing to do is drop the GPS (neron) and just say coordinates (hudr).

Personally, I think that language is just a bunch of symbols that have no real meaning. Each symbol means something only in a context, no matter how broad or specific. I would argue that it doesn't matter which word is more logical to use because logic is just a part of the context.

But you are right.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#92

Post by normangray »

samwillis wrote: post #6

Sadly I don't think this would happen, particularly if Ordnance Survey is responsible, all their data is paid for access. We have a very different model for access to data produced by government agency use to that in the US. USGS Topographic maps: public domain / free UK OS Topographic maps: paid access, and it's not cheep US National Weather Service: Public domain / free commercial use UK MetOffie: Payed access for…

I remember asking a USGS person about this. They remarked that the other difference was that, compared with the OS, the USGS data was a bit rubbish (I may be paraphrasing).

The USGS is funded by some shard of the US federal budget, and does commendably good stuff with the budget it gets; it's there for both high-minded and commerce-supporting reasons. The OS is now (in a sequence of reorganisations from 1990 to 2015) a private company with a government-owned golden share, and is expected to be revenue-positive. The fact that it has more money per square metre of country, means that it's able to be _very_ thorough, mapping down to the level of individual bits of street furniture.

Sidenote: the context I was hearing this included a talk by someone from OS describing using reasoning software to do consistency checking of their GIS: for example, if you find a river bank in the middle of a field, something has been mislabelled. I thought that was cute.

When you buy a data product from OS, you're buying some subset of the layers of the database.

As the other reply pointed out, some of these layers are available for free, and in the last few years there's been some review/churn/debate in the data subsets made available that way (I see there are more details on the Wikipedia page). One can form a variety of opinions on whether those subsets are as big as they could or should be, but there does seem to be a substantial point that the level of the detail in the master map is there because it's profitable for the company (and thus income-generating for the government) to develop it from surveys, and it wouldn't exist otherwise.

I think the Met Office is organised in a similar way.

There are a number of questions of principle and practice here, but the OS seems to me to be claimable as an example (rare, in my opinion) of a privatisation which has produced net positive outcomes.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#93

Post by closewith »

wiredfool wrote: post #56

Essentially the same deal in Ireland, with Eircodes. They were originally created as private dataset with ownership, and now you have to license access to it to use it. 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 apartmen…

Eircodes also aren't used by An Post, to add insult to injury.

> 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)

The HSE National Ambulance Service (NAS) National Emergency Operations Centres (NEOCs) have a GIS package that resolves Eircodes (and other traditional and colloquial addresses) to actual buildings and building entrances in real-time, which actually quite impressive. The directions can be transmitted to ambulances and other assets in real-time and has reduces delays in clinical services due to address confusion enormously since 2016.

So the country is capable. Eircode is what we chose as a country, not what we were limited to.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#94

Post by crote »

TechTechTech wrote: post #30

For comparison, in the Netherlands all postcode data is open data, including detailed building outlines as well as almost all other related information. See https://app.pdok.nl/viewer for most datasets.

This also leads to some very interesting issues, as third parties who automatically ingest the data have a habit of just reading the docs and making the wrong assumptions about what it means in reality.

One example I often encounter myself is Google Maps trying to geolocate my address (city, street name, house number), and then reverse-geolocate that into my postcode. Which sounds like it would work - until you realize that the postcode polygons can overlap. I live in a building where (roughly) each floor has its own postcode, so whenever I try to fill in my address on a website which uses Google's API, it'll "helpfully" auto-fill or "correct" my postcode from 1234AB to 1234AZ. It'll essentially pick a random postcode, because all of them share the same coordinates!

That's Really Really Bad, because the postcode plus house number combination is supposed to uniquely identify a mailbox: it's only a matter of luck that the house numbers aren't reused in the set of postcodes used for my building. They could've just as well reused the numbers at the individual building entrances...

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#95

Post by duncans »

manarth wrote: post #75
intellix wrote: post #65

it would be nice if the postal system in the UK and anywhere in the world supported what3words to be honest

Replace one proprietary format owned by a private organisation with another proprietary format owned by a different private organisation?

Plus, fraught with usability issues https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#96

Post by ethbr1 »

rtpg wrote: post #88
ikr678 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia is similar, howeve, irrespective of how perfect your national addressing standards are, companies ingesting this data providing any sort of to-the-premise service still have to mash and clean and dissect it to fit whatever legacy system they are running. I am aware of one utility provider that is locked into a custom network modelling solution that was officially sunset in 2014 and employs 3 ftes to manuall…

So many Australian sites use some data source that has an old name for the building I'm in, and sites are so convinced their address databases are right that I can't do anything about it! Mildly frustrating

In the US, I had a family member's address change zip codes (approx similar to larger area postal codes) and associated city.

It took a surprising amount of time to cascade through systems, as in years.

I think we're at +8 years now, and Google Maps still has the old zip and city. Which means many websites do too.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#98

Post by mjlee »

xnorswap wrote: post #90
beardyw wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We needed an ambulance off road in the middle of Richmond Park where a postcode would also not help. We didn't have WTW either, which they asked for and would have helped immensely.

If you drop a pin in google maps it shows you the lat/lon, e.g. 51.5010392, -0.1423616 7 decimal places of lat/lon is approximately a centimetre.

To save some maths during a crisis - 3 is ~100m, 4 is ~10m.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#99

Post by growse »

xnorswap wrote: post #90
beardyw wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We needed an ambulance off road in the middle of Richmond Park where a postcode would also not help. We didn't have WTW either, which they asked for and would have helped immensely.

If you drop a pin in google maps it shows you the lat/lon, e.g. 51.5010392, -0.1423616 7 decimal places of lat/lon is approximately a centimetre.

Or a plus code, which is a little less precise, open, and a little easier for humans to transmit than a latlng.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#100

Post by yardstick »

NeoTar wrote: post #48

Some context, for people not located in the UK - A full British postcode typically aims to cover around 15 buildings (sometime a single building, sometimes a street of 50 houses). This is in contrast to many other postal code systems which cover relatively broad areas). Or to put it another way - UK - 2,643,732 codes, 1 code per 25 people, USA - 41,700 codes, 1 code per 8000 people, Germany - 8,200 codes, 1 code per…

> sometime a single building

Fun fact- some postcodes cover only a fraction of a building. There’s buildings where 3 postcodes are used. Same street number, same main entrance, but different post codes.

Edit: A 2-postcode building example is “M3 7GW” and “M3 7GX”, both go to 55 Queen St, Salford.

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