[Talk-GB] Postcode finder based on OSM data

[Matt Williams]

On 17 March 2011 14:35, Matt Williams <lists at milliams.com> wrote:
> 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.

I just spent a very confused half-hour trying to work out why this one
was being ignored until I noticed that the addr:postcode tag was only
added yesterday morning and the planet extract I am using is few days
old.

Fixed now:
http://milliams.dev.openstreetmap.org/postcodefinder/B1%201BB/

>> 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've now added this functionality. It only shows up in a few cases
(e.g. search for street name 'Almond') but it's a little better than
it was.

-- 
Matt Williams
http://milliams.com