[Talk-GB] Import UK postcode data?

[ndrw6 at redhazel.co.uk]

On 04/10/2019 15:41, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> 2. However... just blindly importing them seems to be a real missed
> opportunity. If you give me a nice interface with centroids for Charlbury, I
> will have a go at mapping them to actual, useful polygons, based on my
> knowledge of the street layout and Carla the post-lady's daily rounds (or I
> could ask her, but I'm not sure of the IP of asking an RM employee...). If
> you dump them into the database as-is I almost certainly won't get round to
> it.

Having address points you can "copy" to buildings or POIs does help a 
lot, though.

You can download my .osm files with address points from 
https://github.com/ndrw6/import_postcodes and try them out yourself. 
They work almost the same to what you would get after the import, but 
they are _not_ intended for importing into OSM. Just open them up as a 
temporary data layer in jOSM, and delete them before an upload.

Some benefits of having address points I found in my testing:

- Much faster and easier merging (about 3-5 times) than raster tiles. I 
was regularly adding ~1000 points per ~1 hr session this way. Basically, 
I used copy/paste-tags feature in jOSM, which I remapped to keys 2 and 3 
to make it less taxing than default Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Shift-V.

- More accurate (no typing required). I had a fair number of typos when 
using Chris's tile (entirely my fault).

- It is easy to see which points have already been merged - simply 
delete ones that have been merged. This is very important when working 
on a larger area over multiple sessions. It is super easy to miss some 
sections. This is where Robert's page 
(https://osm.mathmos.net/addresses/pc-stats/) helps but you need to wait 
a day or two for it to update.

- It is easy to see multiple/overlapping postcodes

- In some cases (sub-urban residential areas) It may be possible to 
merge addresses with building automatically. I've described the 
procedure in one of the earlier threads. That could be an option for 
places like Sheffield, which have tens of thousands of postcodes ready 
to merge.

ndrw6