[Talk-GB] Land Registry Prices Paid 'Open Data'

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On 8 January 2015 at 14:46, SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some doubts have been raised about whether this data is truly open, and a
> recent FOI request from Owen Boswarva further strengthens those doubts. See
> his blog post:
> http://mapgubbins.tumblr.com/post/107499166390/it-was-all-a-dream-land-registrys-price-paid.
[snip]
> I am rather sceptical:
>
> The actual quality of the Prices Paid data is not of a standard I would
> expect for data which has been 'PAFed'. There are numerous examples of
> completely erroneous postcodes for a district, postcodes referring to more
> than one street, and vice versa. All of these are elementary things to check
> when cleaning address data.

Do you have any idea of what percentage of the data falls into this category?

In one of the FOI responses, the Land Registry said they tried to
match each new address submitted to them to AddressBase, but just
created their own new entry if the match failed. Could the errors
you're seeing just be the cases where the matching failed? If there
are only a small number of these cases, it wouldn't necessarily mean
that the rest of the data hadn't all be verified against AddressBase.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what comes out of their
discussion with OS and Royal Mail about the use of the addresses in
Open Data. I'm sure Royal Mail won't be happy with any release, as the
LR data must cover a significant proportion of the PAF (does anyone
know how much?). On the other hand it will be rather embarrassing for
the The Land Registry, the the Public Data Group, and the Government
if it turns out it can't be OpenData.

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker