[Talk-GB] Post boxes!

[Robert Whittaker (OSM)]

On 11 May 2012 14:24, Gregory <nomoregrapes at googlemail.com> wrote:
> " Royal Mail grid reference every post box "
> Erm, a request made under the Freedom of Information Act only returned
> textual descriptions (usually names of roads, often a side road it is
> 'near'). I believe Hull has been very hard to find postboxes from this list.
> If there is grid reference data for every post box, then Royal Mail may have
> broken the FoI Act. Although my information may be out of date, or slightly
> wrong.

See http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/postbox_data_in_central_collecti

Royal Mail fought really hard not to release the location data they
have, and despite my best efforts managed to convince the Information
Commissioner that the public interest lay in withholding the
coordinates. :-( But then they released a rather nice CSV file
including two columns of numbers that look remarkably like numerical
OS grid references... Go figure. I'm planning to ask for an updated
list in June (when it will have been a year since that release).

Unfortunately the coordinates in that file are not consistently good.
Most seem to be accurate to within a few meters, but there are quite a
few that are 50-200m out. And then I've found a few that are
completely out -- probably with the coordinates from another box
altogether put in by mistake. From their responses to my FOI request,
I can't see Royal Mail giving us permission to import the coordinates.
Though I don't think we'd want to anyway, since the accuracy isn't
good enough, and it would be a hard job to deal with the merging with
existing data. Nevertheless, the file can be useful for finding where
to look for boxes that might be missing from OSM.

I haven't polished this up yet, but if you want to see a quick
comparison and indications of missing or incorrect boxes in OSM when
compared with Royal Mail's data, have a look at
http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/postboxes/2/map.html . You can use the
results to suggest where you might want to go and survey, but
shouldn't directly copy any Royal Mail data into OSM.

Other postbox tools can be found at http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/postboxes/

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker