[OSM-talk] Suggestion more complete mapping verifactiion

[Simon Hewison]

John Baker wrote:
> Anyway either way does anyone have a list of street names and postcodes? 
> I would hope a mapping community would have something like this or at 
> least an idea of how to get it..........
>  

What you can find reasonably easily, and I think will have less rigid 
licensing issues is the local council list of rubbish collection days. 
They will normally publish a list of street names of all streets that 
have a rubbish collection within their area, and what day. This is a 
statement of facts; and using that I can derive the fact that my street 
has landfill and compostable waste collected on a Monday, and all other 
recycling waste collected on a Tuesday; as do my neighbouring streets, 
but streets on the other side of the council's area have their 
collections on different days. Importantly for us, it's an official list 
of street names in a given geographical area; sometimes with partial 
postcodes.

Ask your local council's information officer nicely if you can't work 
out what you can do with information you download from their web site.

Also, in the UK anyway, the local council are also the first to formally 
name any new streets or developments, and issue postcodes to new streets 
or developments. The INFORMATION (ie. statements of fact) that is given 
in such announcements is public domain.

Database right, in the UK at least, is entirely different to public 
domain information, and a different concept to copyright. Royal Mail's 
PAF file is a database, and the tortuous licensing requirements forbid 
you from using it in pretty much any way that their lawyers haven't 
sanctioned. You can't publish direct extracts of the information taken 
from it, or make it searchable.. or that sort of thing without paying 
lots in licence fees. Multimap, Google, streetmap.co.uk and so on pay 
Royal Mail lots for the sort of lookup that they do.

--
Simon Hewison