[Talk-GB] Postcode finder based on OSM data

[Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists)]

Matt Williams [mailto:lists at milliams.com] wrote:
>Sent: 16 March 2011 7:51 PM
>To: talk-gb at openstreetmap.org
>Subject: [Talk-GB] Postcode finder based on OSM data
>
>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.

Works a treat and it's great to see all my hard work with addressing for the
B72 postcodes.

Cheers

Andy


>
>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=B
>72
>[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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