[Talk-GB] Geospatial Commission to release UPRN/ UPSN identifiers under Open Government Licence

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On Thu, 9 Apr 2020 at 09:21, Tony OSM <tonyosm9 at gmail.com> wrote:
> If the data is to be in the public domain the next step has to be tagging.
> Do we need country specific tags for these two pieces of data?
> What should they be?

Looking at taginfo, there are a number of different tags in use for
UPRN values (see https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/search?q=uprn
where ref:NPLG:UPRN:1 is the most popular). I think it would be good
to agree on a standard key to use before too many more are added. USRN
values are more standardised:
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/search?q=usrn with ref:usrn and
NPLG:USRN:1 being the only two keys in use. (NPLG presumably refers to
the National Land and Property Gazetteer -- see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Land_and_Property_Gazetteer --
but the middle two letters are the wrong way round.)

I would have said that ref:uprn and ref:usrn are the natural choices
for use to use. However, I've seen some calls for country codes to be
added to 3rd-party ref values, so we might consider ref:UK:uprn and
ref:UK:usrn instead. This isn't explicitly documented in the wiki at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:ref though the French
community seems to be using it, as can be seen at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/France/Liste_des_r%C3%A9f%C3%A9rences_nationales
, and I think it might make sense.

I don't see any value in adding NLPG (or it's incorrectly ordered
variant NPLG). Although the National Land and Property Gazetteer is
where the UPRN values originate from, if they're being used as core
identifiers by the government, they're no longer just NLPG values.

I also don't see any benefit in adding a :1 :2 etc suffix to the key
in anticipation of multiple values (which seems to have been done in
several existing UPRN keys). I think this will actually make it harder
for data-users than having a single key name and separating multiple
values with semi-colons. (You would suddenly need to search multiple
different keys to get all possible UPRN-tagged objects.)

So I'd propose that we use either ref:uprn and ref:usrn, or
ref:UK:uprn and ref:UK:usrn. What does everyone else think?

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker