[Talk-GB] Postcode finder based on OSM data

Tim François sk1ppy14 at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Mar 16 20:18:47 GMT 2011


Good work!

I just tried searching based on house number and street name, and it didn't
work if I didn't capitalise the first letters of the street name. Is this a
feature or a bug?

Tim

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 8:16 PM, Tim François <timhafrancois at gmail.com>wrote:

> Good work!
>
> I just tried searching based on house number and street name, and it didn't
> work if I didn't capitalise the first letters of the street name. Is this a
> feature or a bug?
>
> Tim
>
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 7:51 PM, Matt Williams <lists at milliams.com> wrote:
>
>> Greetings all,
>>
>> For the last week I've been working on a sort of 'replacement' for the
>> Royal Mail's postcode/address finder (you know, the one with the ~5
>> queries a day limit without an account) [1] but based entirely on data
>> in the OSM database. You can find my site at [2].
>>
>> It's features are:
>> - Covers the whole of Britain (based on the Geofabrik
>> great_britain.osm.pbf
>>  file from 15 March)
>> - Can search by full or partial postcode
>> - Can search for street and house number or just for street name
>> - Largely based on the Karlsruhe Schema (including the associatedStreet
>>  relation for grouping houses together)
>> - Has a tagging guide [3] to help document the tags the system uses
>> - Fully open-source [4]
>> - 'Error' reporting - these are currently only shown at the bottom of the
>> page
>>  with the error. I will probably make a map out of this at some point.
>>
>> I currently measure about a quarter of a million 'address points' -
>> that is objects with a postcode or with both a housenumber and a
>> street (associates street or addr:street). This compares with the
>> reported 28 million entries in the Royal Mail's PAF. I will provide a
>> more detailed breakdown when I get a chance.
>>
>> Of course in its current state it's not a competitor for the PAF but
>> I'm hoping that the "if you render it, they will map it" rule will
>> apply here to encourage people to add postcodes and addresses. I guess
>> a good postcode to look at is B72 [5] given the excellent work done at
>> [6]. I've also been doing a lot in CV4 so that should be quite good
>> too.
>>
>> Please take a look a the site and give me any feedback on anything you
>> like or don't like. As I said this is only about a week's part-time
>> work so it's unpolished in many places but I figure that RERO is a
>> good idea here.
>>
>> There are a number of features I am still planning on implementing
>> which are recoded at [7,8].
>>
>> The first time you connect to the site it might take a while to load
>> but after that it should be snappy enough.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Matt Williams
>>
>> http://milliams.com
>>
>> [1] http://postcode.royalmail.com
>> [2] http://milliams.dev.openstreetmap.org/postcodefinder/
>> [3] http://milliams.dev.openstreetmap.org/postcodefinder/tagging/
>> [4] http://gitorious.org/postcodefinder
>> [5]
>> http://milliams.dev.openstreetmap.org/postcodefinder/search/?postcode=B72
>> [6] http://blog.mappa-mercia.org/2011/02/whats-in-postcode.html
>> [7]
>> http://gitorious.org/postcodefinder/postcode-analyser/blobs/master/TODO.rst
>> [8]
>> http://gitorious.org/postcodefinder/postcodefinder/blobs/master/TODO.rst
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org
>> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
>>
>
>
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