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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

#191

Post by scott_w »

InsomniacL wrote: post #182
ascorbic wrote: post #60

As he points out, this was a profoundly stupid mistake made when privatising Royal Mail. It would have been trivially easy to do at that point, but now it's a lot harder. If the government decided that it does want to do this, it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail. That's quite apart from the ongoing costs of maintaining th…

> profoundly stupid mistake Surely the PAF formed part of the sale price when privatising Royal Mail? So if you removed it before selling (at a lower price), or you buy it outright after, is there really that much difference making it a profoundly stupid mistake?

To never have given would have simply required the government to say "this is not part of the sale."

To take it would likely require either lengthy court battles or legislation. Given the priorities of the Labour Party, the latter isn't likely to happen within the next 5 years (when they'd have to add it to their manifesto).

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#192

Post by marcosdumay »

gabesullice wrote: post #167
Propelloni wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like bad design by the property developer and a sloppy building authority. The first is corroborated by the lack of unit numbers. Who does such a thing? The BAN actually only tracks down to the plot level, so I assume all your structures are on the same plot. From there on it is the building authorities job to check building plans and to enter the substructures into the cadastre, where they are usually le…

You could be right, but I think it's a little beside the point. The challenge illustrated in the blog post is that it's practically impossible to build a really accurate address dataset since the real world is messy for the reasons you listed. Just like falsehoods programmers believe about names [1], you shouldn't put much faith in anything that claims to normalize addresses either. As other commenters have said in t…

Yes, but it's not reason creating such database, or for not using the standard one from your place.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#193

Post by wongarsu »

myriadoptimum wrote: post #144
Propelloni wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like bad design by the property developer and a sloppy building authority. The first is corroborated by the lack of unit numbers. Who does such a thing? The BAN actually only tracks down to the plot level, so I assume all your structures are on the same plot. From there on it is the building authorities job to check building plans and to enter the substructures into the cadastre, where they are usually le…

Depending on where you are in France (especially places with lots of housing stock being older buildings), it's common (if not the norm) for there to be no unit numbers and to direct people to apartments by floor number / door position relative to stairwell.

That doesn't surprise me, same thing in Germany. However having multiple buildings with the same house number (without distinguishing letters) sounds like the much worse oversight here

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#194

Post by aylons »

petesergeant wrote: post #188
ascorbic wrote: post #60

As he points out, this was a profoundly stupid mistake made when privatising Royal Mail. It would have been trivially easy to do at that point, but now it's a lot harder. If the government decided that it does want to do this, it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail. That's quite apart from the ongoing costs of maintaining th…

> it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail Parliament absolutely can, legally. The issue is that it’ll set a bad precedent that’ll get brought up by the buyer the next time the government want to privatise something.

> Parliament absolutely can, legally. The issue is that it’ll set a bad precedent that’ll get brought up by the buyer the next time the government want to privatise something.

Great, maybe they'll be more wary of taking advantage of this kind of blunder if they can get corrected.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#195

Post by willyt »

londons_explore wrote: post #71

The simple solution here is a threat from the government to Royal Mail. Give us your postcode file for free, or we will simply make up a new numbering scheme, send an address card to every house telling them of their new number with their next council tax bill, and postcodes will become a thing of the past. The new numbering scheme will be unique to each house too, and have a check digit so the number alone is suffic…

Every property already has a UPRN (unique property reference number). If you go on a council website and find a recent planning application it will be linked with this UPRN in the council's database. If I ever want to find a postcode I go to the find a planning application map and look it up there. I've not checked this in England, but it's definitely the case in Scotland. e.g. here's a random example; the entry for St Mungo's Cathedral in Glasgow:

https://publicaccess.glasgow.gov.uk/online-applications/case...

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#196

Post by wongarsu »

gabesullice wrote: post #167
Propelloni wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like bad design by the property developer and a sloppy building authority. The first is corroborated by the lack of unit numbers. Who does such a thing? The BAN actually only tracks down to the plot level, so I assume all your structures are on the same plot. From there on it is the building authorities job to check building plans and to enter the substructures into the cadastre, where they are usually le…

You could be right, but I think it's a little beside the point. The challenge illustrated in the blog post is that it's practically impossible to build a really accurate address dataset since the real world is messy for the reasons you listed. Just like falsehoods programmers believe about names [1], you shouldn't put much faith in anything that claims to normalize addresses either. As other commenters have said in t…

As long as it shows that your address corresponds to that plot of land it's still a perfectly accurate address dataset. Your address just kind of sucks. That doesn't make the dataset less accurate, just less useful.

Still a lot better than some other parts of the world though. In Asia you sometimes have addresses that boil down to the nearest landmark and a phone number for the mailman to call

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#197

Post by throwway_278314 »

left-struck wrote: post #104
londons_explore wrote: post #71

The simple solution here is a threat from the government to Royal Mail. Give us your postcode file for free, or we will simply make up a new numbering scheme, send an address card to every house telling them of their new number with their next council tax bill, and postcodes will become a thing of the past. The new numbering scheme will be unique to each house too, and have a check digit so the number alone is suffic…

To have a unique id for each house is neat but I think there are loads of situations you’d have to account for so that there isn’t any ambiguity in the assignment of unique ids. If any ambiguities exist inevitably you will have exceptions in the system which defeats the point. For example -Subdivision of a lot. -Joining of lots. -You said every house… what about two houses on the same lot? -What about apartments buil…

entity resolution is hard everywhere. Because the world is dynamic, but the common understanding of "entity" is a static object.

and the only perfect description of the world is the world, just like on a more trivial scale the only perfect description of what a piece of software does is to run it and see what it does.

So the best I know is to find a level of abstraction that captures enough stability to be useful, with enough flexibility to enable the classification to adopt.

In math, phylogenetic trees might be an example; think Dirichlette processes and exchangeable stochastic processes.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#198

Post by willyt »

pjc50 wrote: post #136
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did this almost Reaganite sentiment ("I'm from the government and I'm here to help") make home in the UK? I know it's not recent: I remember similar arguments coming from the No2ID camp in 2005 at-least.

Quite a lot of it is Reaganism, via Thatcher. Probably dates from the Winter of Discontent. It's not entirely without merit, but only because there's a tendency to drastically underfund and micromanage state services. And things like the Post Office Horizon fiasco do not make the government look good here. On the other hand GDS is excellent - but that's almost entirely as a result of staff professionalism, rather tha…

'The Post Office' is a private company. Wasn't the Horizon system implemented after privatisation?

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#199

Post by pxeger1 »

ascorbic wrote: post #60

As he points out, this was a profoundly stupid mistake made when privatising Royal Mail. It would have been trivially easy to do at that point, but now it's a lot harder. If the government decided that it does want to do this, it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail. That's quite apart from the ongoing costs of maintaining th…

> it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail

Why not? Parliament has the ability to make whatever laws it wants, no?

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#200

Post by throwway_278314 »

incompatible wrote: post #109
londons_explore wrote: post #71

The simple solution here is a threat from the government to Royal Mail. Give us your postcode file for free, or we will simply make up a new numbering scheme, send an address card to every house telling them of their new number with their next council tax bill, and postcodes will become a thing of the past. The new numbering scheme will be unique to each house too, and have a check digit so the number alone is suffic…

Just modify the law so that databases of postal addresses are not copyrightable.

so modify the law to deprive an owner of their legal property which was given to them by the law?

Not sure that's a precedent I'd want set in a common-law country, and not sure that would hold up to judicial review under common law.

The government made a bone-headed mistake when they included the postal data as an asset in the sale. The solution is for them to admit their mistake and pay for it. It's fiat money anyway, so it doesn't really cost anything. Having them abuse their government power to cover up their mistake is not an approach I endorse.

Not that this hasn't happened before, think postal scandal or yesterday's comments on the Hawke and Curacoa https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41285275

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