I actually have a database lying around somewhere will all possibilities. Quite a high number.<br><br>Cheers<br>Ray<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 22, 2008 7:46 PM, Gervase Markham <<a href="mailto:gerv-gmane@gerv.net">
gerv-gmane@gerv.net</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Someone's probably already thought of this, but...
<br><br>Presumably it would be possible to programmatically generate all<br>possible postcodes. The space wouldn't be all that large, because we<br>know all the prefixes now as freethepostcode and <a href="http://npemap.org.uk" target="_blank">
npemap.org.uk</a> have<br>collected them.<br><br>Then, in a similar fashion to the NameFinder Postcode Lookup:<br><a href="http://www.frankieandshadow.com/osm/" target="_blank">http://www.frankieandshadow.com/osm/</a><br>
you could Google for each one, and parse the resulting pages for<br>something looking like an address.<br><br>Then, for each hit where you found one, in Mechanical Turk fashion, you<br>could present willing volunteers with:
<br><br>- The generated postcode<br>- The possible address text you found<br>- The OpenStreetMap map for the area<br><br>and tell them that if it does look like a valid address, and if they can<br>see the named road, to click on it - or, if not, click "Reject". You
<br>would then store that as a location for that postcode, marked with<br>something which says "this isn't completely verified, and may be a bit<br>vague, but it's a lot better than nothing".<br><br>I think you could do about 300 of these an hour (1 every 10 seconds or
<br>so). This would generate a reasonably-accurate postcode database with<br>much wider coverage fairly quickly. Given that each postcode would be<br>taken from a different web page, there's a good chance there'd be no
<br>encumbering legal issues.<br><br>Of course, the postcode data may well be CC-BY-SA. So it doesn't obviate<br>the need for freethepostcode and npemap. But it would quickly get OSM to<br>a stage where it could do fairly comprehensive postcode lookup.
<br><br>Another, better, source of addresses for this process would be mailing<br>lists borrowed from sympathetic mail order companies. Clearly, they<br>could only let you have addresses they had permission to give you, but
<br>that might be a fair few.<br><br>Gerv<br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>talk mailing list<br><a href="mailto:talk@openstreetmap.org">talk@openstreetmap.org</a><br><a href="http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk" target="_blank">
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Ray Booysen<br><a href="mailto:raybooysen@rjb.za.net">raybooysen@rjb.za.net</a>