[Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

[John Whelan]

I seem to recall the case was dropped as well. Having sad that I think 
the best way forward is

" The number one request on open.canada.ca <http://open.canada.ca> is to 
open the postal code database.  Feel free to add your vote. 
https://open.canada.ca/en/suggested-datasets"

and also add in a building that has a missing postcode.

For example I'm not sure a commitment from the "Stop Climate Change 
Party " to make them Open Data should mean we all vote for this party.  
I think current MPs are too busy with the election at the moment.

Cheerio John


James wrote on 2019-10-02 8:38 PM:
> funny you should mention geocoder.ca <http://geocoder.ca>
>
> The owner of that website was sued by Canada Post because he was crowd 
> sourcing postal codes. Just recently (2 ish years ago?) they dropped 
> the lawsuit because they knew they didnt have a case(He came to the 
> Ottawa meetups a couple of times)
>
> On Wed., Oct. 2, 2019, 8:08 p.m. Jarek Piórkowski, 
> <jarek at piorkowski.ca <mailto:jarek at piorkowski.ca>> wrote:
>
>     Yeah, Canada Post currently considers postal codes their commercial
>     data. Crowd-sourcing all or a substantial amount of full codes seems
>     infeasible. Crowd-sourcing the forward sortation areas (the first A1A)
>     seems difficult since verifiability is going to be a problem
>     especially around the edges of the areas.
>
>     The website OpenStreetMap.org returns results for some postal codes
>     from a third-party database https://geocoder.ca/?terms=1 which is not
>     ODbL-compatible either.
>
>     Partial mapping is causing some problems with tools like Nominatim
>     that attach the nearest tagged postcode to search results, often
>     resulting in improper postal codes for reverse address lookups,
>     however that is arguably a tooling problem and not an OSM problem per
>     se.
>
>     This isn't going to be pretty until Canada Post is persuaded to free
>     the data. Call your MP, everybody.
>
>     --Jarek
>
>     On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 17:38, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com
>     <mailto:jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     >
>     > " The number one request on open.canada.ca
>     <http://open.canada.ca> is to open the postal code database.  Feel
>     free to add your vote. https://open.canada.ca/en/suggested-datasets"
>     >
>     > Cheerio John
>     >
>     > On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 13:32, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com
>     <mailto:jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     >>
>     >> On the import mailing list there is a proposal to import
>     postcodes in the UK one of the reasons given was that many like to
>     input a postcode to get directions on smartphones using things
>     like OSMand.
>     >>
>     >> I don't think an Open Data source with the correct licensing is
>     available in Canada but OSMand appears to be able to use the
>     postcode if it is entered in the map as part of the address.  Is
>     there any Open Data that might be useful?
>     >>
>     >> I don't know if it is possible but could something be used to
>     extract postcodes in the current map and from there perhaps we
>     could come up with a list of missing postcodes that need one
>     address with it in mapped?
>     >>
>     >> As a minimum if you could add a few in you know from local
>     knowledge that might help fill in some gaps.
>     >>
>     >> Thoughts
>     >>
>     >> Thanks John
>     >
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