[Talk-GB] UPRN Locations Map

[Mark Goodge]

On 02/08/2020 11:58, Jez Nicholson wrote:
> My initial thought was also "conspiracy!". Licence problem is more 
> likely, or perhaps they were concerned that someone might poll the URL 
> with every available UPRN.

I'm certain that it's been done to prevent people using the EA site as a 
means of looking up an address from a UPRN. That's the only plausible 
explanation for a change which both makes the site more complex from an 
operator point of view (instead of a single database lookup, it now 
needs to do several to identify the property from the postcode and 
sequence ID) and less useful from a user perspective (because you can no 
longer bookmark and share a link to a specific property).

If it is a licence issue, then that's going to have ramifications beyond 
the EA. A lot of local authorities use the UPRN in the URL for 
property-related information. For example, if you live in Cambridge, you 
can check when your bins will be emptied by appending the UPRN to the page:

https://www.cambridge.gov.uk/check-when-your-bin-will-be-emptied#id=200004173390

and if you live in Worcestershire, you can check lots of useful stuff 
about your property:

http://e-services.worcestershire.gov.uk/MyLocalArea/MyLocalAreaResults.aspx?uprn=100120673306

It seems to me that this is precisely how the UPRN should be used by 
government and other organisations. To quote Matt Hancock from when he 
was the secretary of state for DCMS:

"The UPRN is the jewel at the heart of the addressing system. It links 
address data across a diverse range of systems and services facilitating 
greater accuracy and immediate data sharing"

and the government's own statement on open UPRNs states that

"Users need property and street information with identifiers that remain 
the same over time and are easy to exchange between systems."

and

"Systems, services and applications that store or publish data sets 
containing property and street information must use the UPRN and USRN 
identifiers."

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government/identifying-property-and-street-information

So it seems to me that there should be no licensing issues with using 
the UPRN as a unique identifier in a public URL. If anything, the 
requirement to use UPRNs in any published dataset seems to pretty much 
make it the simplest means of compliance.

(I appreciate that this is going a bit off topic for OSM, so I think 
I'll leave it there unless there's anything else directly 
mapping-related, but it's worth noting that this change has already been 
mentioned on social media and I suspect it's an issue which will gain 
more traction over time).

Mark