[Talk-GB] Land Registry postcode tool now running

Matt Williams lists at milliams.com
Thu Sep 13 01:00:34 BST 2012


Hi all,

During the discussion about the Land Registry 'Price Paid' database
discussions I promised that I'm put together a tool to make it more
useful. As such I've now got working (to a state I'm happy with) a
sub-website on my Postcode Finder to provide an interface to that
data.

Currently running at
http://milliams.dev.openstreetmap.org/postcodefinder/landregistry/
(there's no public link to it yet so you'll have to bookmark it) it
does the following:

Given a postcode (or postcode fragment) it finds all the houses in the
Land Registry database and tries to match each of them up to an
address in my Postcode Finder database.
If it finds a match it classifies it into one of three classes:
 - The postcode matches between OSM and the Land Registry
 - The postcode doesn't match
 - There's no postcode

If you perform a search (like
http://milliams.dev.openstreetmap.org/postcodefinder/landregistry/search/?postcode=CV4+8)
you see that I've sorted the classes by 'importance' order so wrong
postcodes are first, followed by missing postcodes. Then the ones that
couldn't be matched to any address and finally the perfect matches.

Give it a try yourself. It should be able to handle anything from
"CV4" level (will take around 10 seconds to load (probably more for
big cities like Birmingham and London) down to "CV4 8DU". It will
almost certainly struggle if you try to put in "B" or something big
like that. If you want to search for all the "B1" postcodes but
exclude "B10", "B11" etc (since that would be a very slow query) then
just put a space after it in the search box ("B1 ") or a plus in the
URL ("?postcode=B1+"). It's probably best to only give it as specific
a postcode as is possible ("XXN N" is quite quick) to keep the load
low on the dev server.

There's still some things I want to do with it but it's now in a
workable state. The data from the OSM database is a few days old now.
I'll wait for Geofabrik's ODbL extracts to be released before I update
again.

It should also be possible for me to extend the service to include and
data source which contains "house number; street name; postcode" so
I'll look into that in the future.

-- 
Matt Williams
http://milliams.com



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