[Talk-GB] UPRN Locations Map

[Nick]

Personally, I don't think that classifying UPRNs (e.g. historic, parent, 
non-addressable etc.) nor publishing dynamically the allocations to the 
custodians of batches of UPRNs would detract from the commercial value 
derived by Ordnance Survey (OS). I fully understand that as a limited 
company, OS is perhaps less motivated to collaborate with the public. 
However, public bodies such as the Environment Agency surely have a 
broader responsibility to the public?

Why I get on my high horse about this is the knowledge that UPRNs and 
related data have errors but perhaps even more tragically, the lack of 
openness can lead to direct impact to people's lives. I also realise 
that the OSM Foundation is a non-profit organisation whose purpose is to 
support the OSM project - my reading is that this is technical rather 
than political. I also re-read Owen Boswarva's blog 
https://www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-addr1.htm and end up feeling that 
the publishing of Open Data is a bit like the comment "When information 
is missing, we speculate about what the government might be hiding, or 
fill in the gaps with anecdotes." 
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/02/government-publish-data-coronavirus-deaths]

I therefore believe that the current situation regarding openness leads 
to speculation and as Mark so clearly states to "deliberately minimise 
the utility of the Open UPRN database" - the risk is that this sort of 
speculation leads to a lack of trust

On 01/08/2020 21:19, Mark Goodge wrote:
>
>
> On 01/08/2020 20:24, Nick wrote:
>> As a follow up, Robert Whittaker also submitted an FOI asking for 
>> "... a list of all UPRNs that are classified as 'historic', and a 
>> separate list of all those classified as a 'parent' ....". the 
>> logicto me was that this would help users of Open Data to then filter 
>> these out. The response that this was "exempt from disclosure under 
>> section 21 of the FOIA" - if you are interested follow the link to 
>> https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/lists_of_historic_and_parent_upr
>
> In another move, the Environment Agency flood risk website no longer 
> allows you to link directly to a property by UPRN. You used to be able 
> to construct a link in this format:
>
> https://flood-warning-information.service.gov.uk/long-term-flood-risk/risk?address=[uprn] 
>
>
> But that no longer works. Now, you have to search by postcode, and 
> when you select an address the site then sets a cookie which 
> determines which property details you will be shown. And, checking the 
> source of the postcode page, it no longer has the UPRN as a variable 
> for each property. Instead, it's a simple sequential number. For 
> example, if there are ten properties in a postcode, then the variables 
> will be numbered 0 to 9.
>
> I'm pretty certain this is deliberate, in order to stop people using 
> their site as a way to look up addresses from a UPRN. And I suspect 
> it's part of the same attempts by GeoPlace to deliberately minimise 
> the utility of the Open UPRN database.
>
> Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb