<div dir="ltr">I just re-read a <a target="_blank" href="http://sk53-osm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/british-postcodes-on-openstreetmap.html">post</a> I wrote nearly 3 years ago. I think a lot of it holds true today, so I've copied the main points here :<br><br><ol><li>The simplest, but not necessarily the easiest target, is to map at least one postcode in each postcode sector. This is harder than it appears because obvious things to map in sparsely populated rural areas may require surveys. For instance FHRS data has two B&Bs in Port Wemyss on Islay, but the names are not shown on the OS Open Data StreetView. Similarly a degree of caution must be exercised on farms in the Rhinns of Islay and on the Oa because individual farmsteads may include two or three properties (perhaps all owned by the same extended family, but nonetheless distinct.<br><br></li><li>Achieve 5% completion. This reflects a DOUBLING of current postcode data, and therefore must be regarded as ambitious. This is however, the minimum condition for breaking the back of the postcode problem. I believe with a concerted effort we could achieve this in 3 months, using conventional crowd-sourcing techniques.<br><br></li><li>Achieve 10% completion. A second doubling will probably require more tool based support. The obvious targets are semi-automated matching of FHRS & Land Registry data, and semi-automated identification of single postcode streets.<br><br></li><li>Postcodes along major roads (A & B roads). These may require some survey work, but again because many retail outlets are along such roads there is already a decent amount of information available from FHRS.</li></ol><p>This was December 2013, so perhaps 5% and 10% should be nearer 10% and 20%. I don't have up-to-date figures but back in May 2015 we had 73,372 full well-formed postcodes for GB (not whole of UK) which is still under 5%. These were located in just under 8000 postcode sectors (out of a total of 12,300 or so, with another 1000 populated in the last year). FHRS data has information on nearly 250k postcodes (inc NI) and 10k distinct postcode sectors. All these figures are based on raw strings, i.e., not checked if valid or in the right place. We still have thousands of schools mapped without postcode (even some where ref_edubase was added) so this is another fairly easy target.</p><p>The big difference from 3 years ago is that we have more people interested in creating tools to assist these processes: something where the 3 month timescale is better than a shorter one.</p><p>We have needed to get more address data for some, but on its own it's not a very strong motivator. My hopes for making big progress with Land Registry data were dashed once OpenAddresses and Owen Boswara clarified the 3rd party content in the data, and similarly the OpenAddresses project finished without having much in the way of additional data to offer us. (I still believe that there's scope in their approach and they built some interesting tools, but it was predicated on already having a decent amount of usable open data). When one looks at the formidable success of BANO in France there must be scope for something similar in the UK.</p><p>I'm going to try & update my PC completion maps for the UK. I have some now but I know I have lost data from filtering the gb file.</p><p>Jerry<br></p><p></p><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 26 September 2016 at 11:44, Brian Prangle <span dir="ltr"><<a target="_blank" href="mailto:bprangle@gmail.com">bprangle@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr"><div><div>It looks like the next UK Quarterly Project will be based on improving address data for town centres using the food hygiene dataset. Why don't we have a push generally on postcodes too, not limiting it to town centres?<br><br></div>Regards<br><br></div>Brian<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 26 September 2016 at 11:25, David Woolley <span dir="ltr"><<a target="_blank" href="mailto:forums@david-woolley.me.uk">forums@david-woolley.me.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote"><span>On 26/09/16 10:19, Owen Boswarva wrote:<br>
<blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote">
That could be done but it's not straightforward; you'll get a lot of<br>
overlapping postcode sectors and sectors with non-contiguous parts.<br>
GeoLytix produced an open dataset like that some time ago:<br>
<a target="_blank" rel="noreferrer" href="http://blog.geolytix.net/tag/postcode-boundaries/">http://blog.geolytix.net/tag/p<wbr>ostcode-boundaries/</a><br>
</blockquote>
<br></span>
In my view, inferring polygons is something that should only be done in the data consumer, as they involve creating data that cannot be justified from the input data.<br>
<br>
<blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote"><span>
<br>
On 26 September 2016 at 09:39, Colin Smale <<a target="_blank" href="mailto:colin.smale@xs4all.nl">colin.smale@xs4all.nl</a><br></span><span>
<mailto:<a target="_blank" href="mailto:colin.smale@xs4all.nl">colin.smale@xs4all.nl</a>><wbr>> wrote:<br>
<br>
How about deriving polygons for the postcode sector level (XX9 9)<br>
from the centroid point cloud, and adding the polygons to OSM? I<br>
don't know how many that would give, but it would be a whole lot<br>
less than 500k and still at a very usable level.<br>
<br>
</span></blockquote>
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