[Talk-GB] UPRN to postcode lookup

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2021 at 21:06, Rob Nickerson <rob.j.nickerson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was reading the latest (always detailed and helpful) blog post by Owen Boswarva today on addresses [1]. One thing that it mentioned that I was not aware of was that there is a lookup between Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs) and Postcodes:
>
> "National datasets of UPRNs matched to postcode units and statistical geographies are available as open data in ONS's National Statistics Address Lookup (NSUL) and ONS UPRN Directory (ONSUD). From late 2020 those datasets also associate UPRNs with postcodes, enabling the calculation of notional geographic extents for individual postcode units."
>
> Has anyone had a look at this?

It certainly looks useful for determining postcodes of individual
properties, and possibly spotting errors in existing addr:postcode
tags, with greater precision than from the centroids in Code-Point
Open. One warning though (as someone else has already noted) I think
they assign postcodes to non-addressable objects, including historic
UPRNs that no longer exist on the ground. We'd need to be careful that
the UPRNs we're using to infer postcodes are current and correspond to
the property we think they do.

> Do we think the licence is sufficiently "open" for OpenStreetMap use?

If https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/geography/geographicalproducts/nationalstatisticsaddressproducts
and https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/geography/licences are be
believed, then it's available under the Open Government Licence. I
think it's fairly safe to assume OS knows what ONS is doing and so
nothing will fall under the "third party rights the Information
Provider is not authorised to license". Hence it should be safe for
use in OSM -- but an explicit check would be good.

However, in the Licensing section of the user guide Rob provided a
link to, after specifying the attribution statements, there's an
additional requirement that "the same attribution statements are
contained in any sub-licences of the Information that are granted,
together with a requirement that any further sub-licences do the
same." I think this is probably an error left over from when that was
a requirement of the OS Open Data Licence. Such a condition would be a
problem for OSM, so it would be good to get clarification from ONS
about this before making use of the data.

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker