[Talk-GB] OS Open Names

[Andy Robinson]

Nice work Chris,

Cheers
Andy

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Hill [mailto:osm at raggedred.net] 
Sent: 03 June 2015 18:57
To: Talk-GB
Subject: [Talk-GB] OS Open Names

Hi,
I've been looking at OS Open Names, part of the Ordnance Survey Open Data. OS notified me that OS Locator will be withdrawn, hinted that Codepoint Open will be withdrawn too and that OS Open Names is the combined replacement. OS Open Names is published under OGL, so it is compatible with OSM's licence.

The OS Open Names data has place names, road names and postcode centroids, all with location fields. Original OS open data was positioned to a square metre, the new locations have decimal parts of metres which may make them a bit more accurate, possibly millimetre accurate.

I have extracted the postcode data from OS Open Names and generated a fresh set of postcode tiles to look at. The centroid locations are different from the Codepoint Open and ONS locations, but all that I have checked seem an appropriate location, and possibly more useful. The difference is more than the sub-metre accuracy improvements. You can use oscompare[1] to see the new postcode centroids alongside the older centroids. I've made the Open Names postcodes magenta to distinguish them - I think I prefer red but I'll leave that for another day. You can use the tiles in JOSM and P2 using the url below[2]

The OS Locator replacement has a significant drawback: OS Locator had a field for the road name and a field for the road reference. OS Open Names ignores the reference for any road, or section of a road, that has name, only showing the reference for unnamed roads. (thanks to Robert
(ris) for drawing my attention to this).

I now have the data extracted and reprojected to replace OS grid refs with lon, lat. If anyone is interested in this data I can supply it, please ask.

[1]
http://oscompare.raggedred.net/?zoom=17&lat=53.95537&lon=-1.03351&layers=B00FFTFT

[2] http://www.raggedred.net/tiles/opennames/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

--
Cheers, Chris
user: chillly
  


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