[Talk-GB] Postcode finder based on OSM data

[Matt Williams]

On 17 March 2011 13:37, Andy Mabbett <andy at pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote:
> On 16 March 2011 19:51, Matt Williams <lists at milliams.com> wrote:
>> For the last week I've been working on a sort of 'replacement' for the
>> Royal Mail's postcode/address finder
>
> That's great; and I trust that my constructive feedback won't be taken
> as dissing your achievment...

No, I'm happy for people to point out problems with it. Otherwise
it'll never improve :)

> You return nothing for "B1 1BB" (Birmingham Council House), which is
> tagged "addr:postcode=B1 1BB"

This is most likely a bug in my parser. I'll have to take a look at it
this evening and see why it's being ignored. Thanks for the report.
This is exactly what I need to find bugs.

> For a common address, such as "2 High Street", you return multiple
> results, with no obvious distinguishing feature. Please include the
> "addr:city" value in the results (if present); and allow searches to
> be limited by that tag.

Yes, I'd realised this would be a problem but I hadn't been sure how
to fix it. Adding the addr:city tag to the search results would be a
good start but without a full reverse geocoder (or full PostGIS
database) there's only so much I can do. I didn't want to bombard
Nominatim all the time for these results.

> I'll be happy to log these in a bug tracker, if you have one.

I don't currently so just send them to this list or to me directly.
Maybe I'll get up a project on the OSM Trac.

-- 
Matt Williams
http://milliams.com