[Talk-GB] UK Postcodes

Paul Berry pmberry2007 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 4 11:52:26 UTC 2016


In the light of recent talk about postcode coverage, I've started mapping
with postal_code the highways that front groups of buildings known to have
the same postcode. However, that's in turn led me to notice that OSM still
uses NPEMap as a reference for postcode searches. Given that NPEMap
themselves declare this data as no longer being updated (since October 2015
from what I can gather) why does OSM still link there?

Also, shouldn't OSM be looking inwards to its own data first (or some
aggregator service that provides this), then falling back to next-best
services like NPEMap for secondary results?

The upshot is none of the postcodes I've added (as addr:postcode and
postal_code) in nearly three years of edits to OSM show up in a search,
other than the best-guessing of AB12 3## format, which is a bit
discouraging.

Is there a plan to resolve this or am I missing something?

Regards,
*Paul*


On 26 September 2016 at 14:29, SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com> wrote:

> I just re-read a post
> <http://sk53-osm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/british-postcodes-on-openstreetmap.html>
> I wrote nearly 3 years ago. I think a lot of it holds true today, so I've
> copied the main points here :
>
>
>    1. The simplest, but not necessarily the easiest target, is to map at
>    least one postcode in each postcode sector. This is harder than it appears
>    because obvious things to map in sparsely populated rural areas may require
>    surveys. For instance FHRS data has two B&Bs in Port Wemyss on Islay, but
>    the names are not shown on the OS Open Data StreetView. Similarly a degree
>    of caution must be exercised on farms in the Rhinns of Islay and on the Oa
>    because individual farmsteads may include two or three properties (perhaps
>    all owned by the same extended family, but nonetheless distinct.
>
>    2. Achieve 5% completion. This reflects a DOUBLING of current postcode
>    data, and therefore must be regarded as ambitious. This is however, the
>    minimum condition for breaking the back of the postcode problem. I believe
>    with a concerted effort we could achieve this in 3 months, using
>    conventional crowd-sourcing techniques.
>
>    3. Achieve 10% completion. A second doubling will probably require
>    more tool based support. The obvious targets are semi-automated matching of
>    FHRS & Land Registry data, and semi-automated identification of single
>    postcode streets.
>
>    4. Postcodes along major roads (A & B roads). These may require some
>    survey work, but again because many retail outlets are along such roads
>    there is already a decent amount of information available from FHRS.
>
> This was December 2013, so perhaps 5% and 10% should be nearer 10% and
> 20%. I don't have up-to-date figures but back in May 2015 we had 73,372
> full well-formed postcodes for GB (not whole of UK) which is still under
> 5%. These were located in just under 8000 postcode sectors (out of a total
> of 12,300 or so, with another 1000 populated in the last year). FHRS data
> has information on nearly 250k postcodes (inc NI) and 10k distinct postcode
> sectors. All these figures are based on raw strings, i.e., not checked if
> valid or in the right place. We still have thousands of schools mapped
> without postcode (even some where ref_edubase was added) so this is another
> fairly easy target.
>
> The big difference from 3 years ago is that we have more people interested
> in creating tools to assist these processes: something where the 3 month
> timescale is better than a shorter one.
>
> We have needed to get more address data for some, but on its own it's not
> a very strong motivator. My hopes for making big progress with Land
> Registry data were dashed once OpenAddresses and Owen Boswara clarified the
> 3rd party content in the data, and similarly the OpenAddresses project
> finished without having much in the way of additional data to offer us. (I
> still believe that there's scope in their approach and they built some
> interesting tools, but it was predicated on already having a decent amount
> of usable open data). When one looks at the formidable success of BANO in
> France there must be scope for something similar in the UK.
>
> I'm going to try & update my PC completion maps for the UK. I have some
> now but I know I have lost data from filtering the gb file.
>
> Jerry
>
>
> On 26 September 2016 at 11:44, Brian Prangle <bprangle at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It looks like the next UK Quarterly Project will be based on improving
>> address data for town centres using the food hygiene dataset. Why don't we
>> have a push generally on postcodes too, not limiting it to town centres?
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Brian
>>
>> On 26 September 2016 at 11:25, David Woolley <forums at david-woolley.me.uk>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 26/09/16 10:19, Owen Boswarva wrote:
>>>
>>>> That could be done but it's not straightforward; you'll get a lot of
>>>> overlapping postcode sectors and sectors with non-contiguous parts.
>>>> GeoLytix produced an open dataset like that some time ago:
>>>> http://blog.geolytix.net/tag/postcode-boundaries/
>>>>
>>>
>>> In my view, inferring polygons is something that should only be done in
>>> the data consumer, as they involve creating data that cannot be justified
>>> from the input data.
>>>
>>>
>>>> On 26 September 2016 at 09:39, Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl
>>>> <mailto:colin.smale at xs4all.nl>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>     How about deriving polygons for the postcode sector level (XX9 9)
>>>>     from the centroid point cloud, and adding the polygons to OSM? I
>>>>     don't know how many that would give, but it would be a whole lot
>>>>     less than 500k and still at a very usable level.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
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