[OSM-talk] Free the postcode maps

Ben Gimpert ben at somethingmodern.com
Wed Jul 5 09:12:25 BST 2006


On Tue,  4 Jul 06 @05:11pm, Tom Carden wrote:
> On 04/07/06, Simon Hewison <simon at zymurgy.org> wrote:
> >
> >Talking of which, has anyone thought of asking our friends at eCourier if
> >they can help? I mean, they probably already have the postcode of a pick-up
> >and a delivery, and their GPS traces should pass those locations, with a
> >stop of at least a minute.
> 
> Yes, we asked them (and about street data that their users had
> entered).  They said no :(
> 
> Obviously I don't speak for eCourier here, but if I recall correctly
> (without violating my NDA!) the problem was that they would probably
> be violating the terms of their geocoder license. In essence they'd be
> caching the location it gave them plus a bit of random noise added by
> actually visiting the location... I know that sounds silly but that's
> how it is. It's not totally out of the question, but they weren't
> willing to risk it.

This same meeting was the start of my yearnings for a spare 100k to
bribe... err, "hire" a few couriers to carry a cheap digital camera for
a week, snapping photos of the street sign nearest every delivery
location.  (This gets around Mr. Sheldon's "office address vs. loading
dock" address problem.)

And then as a one-off job, we OCR these photos en' masse and use the GPS
traces to get a coordinate for each street sign.  In much of London at
least, each of these photos would contain full street name *and* the
base postcode.  Yes, we'll get an astronomical error rate from bad
lighting, fuzzy camera focus, laziness -- but I argue that courier
redundancy could give us an excellent base for free London geocoding.

We'd need buy-in from the courier's mother company, since their
deliveries would be *slightly* slower that week.  (Hence, the bribe.)
But most importantly, this process would leave aside the issue of
potentially-infringing the geocoder.

		Anyone an angel?
		Ben





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