[Talk-GB] Postcode centroids - use in searching

Lester Caine lester at lsces.co.uk
Fri Jan 21 15:36:28 GMT 2011


Ed Avis wrote:
> Lester Caine<lester at ...>  writes:
>
>> Many search engines, even map based ones, have used 'EX13 7##' based
>> data until quite recently. In the absence of anything better it was
>> all that was available.  NOW we do at least have the finer detail
>> coordinate data from OS even if it does not give real road
>> names. THAT is at least better for looking up 'xx within a 20 mile
>> radius' where the previous options may well have only had 50 mile
>> accuracy.
>
> Ah!  I thought that the EX13 7## results _were_ the Code Point Open
> data.  Perhaps because they seemed to appear on the OSM website at
> about the same time as the Opendata release first came out.
>
> But yes, I see that the OS data set is much better than I thought - it
> has positions for every single postcode.
>
>> So replacing the course data with finer lookup is at least a step
>> forward.
>
> Yes, I think postcode search is an important application for OSM, so
> it would be great to import this data so that Nominatim and other
> searches can use it.  That would supersede the current approximate
> lookup based on FreeThePostcode.

That is - I believe - where the EX13 7## data actually came from.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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