251–260 of 317 posts
Recent history teaches that the Post Office should be the last company on earth to be anywhere near creating a nationally important IT system. Their technology team have been useless for decades.
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…
A cautionary example of how data meets reality… 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 buil…
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…
Hence why a house number and postcode constitutes a complete address in the UK, we’ve sort of already got What Three Words with “a number and 5-7 characters” - not quite as catchy though
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A cautionary example of how data meets reality… 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 buil…
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…
Off topic but this is a bizarrely weird take: > Sadly because of the NIMBYs, this map doesn’t include a London version of The Sphere. "NIMBY" implies they're objecting to something useful and not actually that bad, like a solar farm or a mobile phone mast or a housing estate. Not a giant advertising billboard.
There's information about it here - https://postcodes.io/about - which doesn't fully answer where the data comes from, although it mentions OS, so I presume it's based on the OS AddressBase product?
I also wonder how complete it is now, although the sites we've built haven't had any issues as far as I'm aware.
I spent almost a year having to enter my address manually because the postcode DB — or whatever old version pets.com, cameras.com, and looroll.com had — lagged behind the reality of my infill bungalow for seemingly forever. I’m 8A godamnit, not 8. (Thank you Mrs. No8 for accepting my packages throughout those dark months btw.)
It’s just like tzdata. A precious resource not just because it compiles the history of geopolitical wallclock settings, but also because it is meticulously updated, on time and on budget.
It’s all very well liberating PAF.v2024_08finalfinal_v3_final.doc, but who is also going to keep it up to date?
I’m not a hater, just a realist. TFA is spot on: we’ll never be able out compete with or recreate or leak a sufficient version of the PAF. It, and it’s entire infrastructure, needs to be wrested into public hands ASAP. And we should be prepared to fund the updates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some larger retail stores in Germany ask you for your postcode during checkout, presumably to learn a bit about their customer base. I don't mind telling them mine, there are about 16K people with the same postcode. But I'm pretty sure I would not tell them if I was one of the two forest rangers in Reinhardswald. (And yes, I do pay cash whenever I can.)
Interesting, is the German postcode not used for transaction validation? I know the American payment processors definitely use ZIP codes for validation - see anecdote 1. That said, there are definitely situations where the payment processors don't require the ZIP code - see anecdote 2. Anecdote 1: When I worked in food service as a kid, I used card terminals that connected directly to a phone line. I remember a coupl…
> The upshot of the research then, is that building an accurate database is really hard. OS concludes that it would have to check the 4.2m bad addresses manually to make its PAF-less database a viable dataset that would actually be useful. The secret to the Royal Mail's success with the PAF, and the reason why only the Royal Mail can maintain the PAF, is that the Royal Mail has people walking and driving to all those…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A cautionary example of how data meets reality… 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 buil…
Frankly, that just sounds like a fire code / building code issue. Are these "apartment buildings" legal for habitation, with actual legal separate apartments, and not some weird subdivision/subletting situation? In every place I have ever lived, having a clearly marked addresses and door numbers for apartments is required by the fire code. If there's an emergency that requires a fire or ambulance response, smoke in t…