[Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

Thu Oct 3 04:22:20 UTC 2019

I've found a good resource to use is a business website. Particularly a store with multiple locations, a mall directory, or a BIA. They have several postal codes that are associated with their respective addresses.

Unfortunately it does require manual work (or you could pair a scrapper with a geocoder to do the tedious part) but given there is no available datasets we're licenced to use currently, it's the only public resource I know of where you can get pockets of postal codes.

As more and more get added, the zones will begin to reflect their true shape more accurately and it'll be easier to extrapolate.

I know it's not the best answer but any bit helps I suppose.

On Oct. 2, 2019 21:33, John Whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:
I had long discussions with Canada Post about postcodes years ago.  I was working with Treasury Board standards group at the time looking at addressing standards and I'm very aware of the limitations.

Rural post codes are very definitely an issue and not all postcodes used by Stats Canada and other government departments for example are physical locations.

Open Data would be nice but realistically it isn't going to happen in the short term.

Having said that what is doable is spotting postcodes that do exist but are not in OpenStreetMap then tagging a building with an address that includes a postcode in that postcode.

For example  if K4A 1M7 exists in the map then it would be reasonable to assume that K4A 1M6 - 1M1 should also exist so could be looked for.

Cobourg is an example where there are far fewer postcodes than one might like to see.

Cheerio John

Kevin Farrugia wrote on 2019-10-02 8:53 PM:
I don't want to rain on the postal code party, and maybe I'm a little jaded from using the data, but I use the Postal Code Conversion File (PCCF) from Statistics Canada (who get it from Canada Post) at work.  In general I would say that the postal code points are in mediocre shape.

Some things I've noticed about the data and postal codes in general:
* There is usually one postal code point per postal code, although there are cases where there can be several points for a postal code.  For example, with some postal codes, if you were to make them polygons, would generate multiple polygons that are intersected by other postal codes.
* Postal codes, especially rural ones, pop in and out of existence and so are a little harder to track and are less permanent than addresses.
* Postal codes will sometimes jump from one side of a road (even municipality) between years as they try to improve accuracy.
I would check out the Limitations section if you'd like to see more: https://www.canadapost.ca/cpc/assets/cpc/uploads/files/marketing/2017-postal-code-conversion-file-reference-guide-en.pdf

Forward Sortation Areas do exist as open data through Statistics Canada - StatsCan generates these FSA polygons based on respondents of the Census.  There are two limitations to this dataset on which I would advise against importing it into OSM:
1) Since businesses do not respond to the Census, they generally do not have FSAs for large industrial areas.  These areas are covered by the nearest FSA that they know about/can define, but this can also cause some movements of boundaries from Census to Census.
2) Because postal codes are created for the purpose of mail sortation and delivery, the FSA boundaries StatsCan is able to create are not exact.
Here's the reference document if you're interested: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/92-179-g/92-179-g2016001-eng.htm

If at some point they did release it as open data, it might be decent enough for the purposes of general geocoding in OSM, I just don't want people to think it's as well maintained and reliable as some other types of government data.

-Kevin (Kevo)

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 20:39, James <james2432 at gmail.com<mailto:james2432 at gmail.com>> wrote:
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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-ca mailing list
> Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org<mailto:Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org>
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca

_______________________________________________
Talk-ca mailing list
Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org<mailto:Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org>
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
_______________________________________________
Talk-ca mailing list
Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org<mailto:Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org>
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca

_______________________________________________
Talk-ca mailing list
Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org<mailto:Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org>
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca

--
Sent from Postbox<https://www.postbox-inc.com>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ca/attachments/20191003/ff8e008b/attachment.html>