[Talk-GB] Office of National Statistics data

[Andy Robinson]

Colin, it's fine to add the postcode data to a node object (eg a poi), just
don't create a node with just the postcode and nothing else as this is
meaningless. The postcode data we have is not the information for individual
buildings, its just the centroid of the address polygon which will contain
any number of buildings (or post delivery points). Thus when using the data
its still necessary to do some interpretation and it's not possible always
to know that you are assigning the right postcode to the right
building/delivery point because we don't know where the boundary of one
postcode is against another for the same street etc. 

Cheers
Andy

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Colin Smale [mailto:colin.smale at xs4all.nl]
> Sent: 31 October 2012 12:08
> To: talk-gb at openstreetmap.org
> Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] Office of National Statistics data
> 
> > The UK Office for National Statistics has released some data [1] under
> > the Open Government licence [2] . I've extracted the postcode data
> > from it and created a tile overlay which can help find a postcode for
> > a building in GB, excluding Northern Ireland. More info is at
> > http://onspd.raggedred.net including using the tiles layers in
> > Potlatch
> > 2 & JOSM.
> 
> Brilliant!
> 
> I notice you say "PLEASE do not add the centroids to the OSM map database.
> The centroids are not real objects so they do not belong in the OSM
> database.". Is this not something we actually do all the time? We
represent
> places and amenities by a node as an approximation, unless someone takes
> the time to enter the true extent of the object in question, which often
> doesn't happen.
> 
> Colin
> 
> 
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