[OSM-talk] UK post box data

Gervase Markham gerv-gmane at gerv.net
Sun Jul 6 22:25:35 BST 2008


Tom Taylor wrote:
> I did some parsing of the PDF, and it seems that of the 114,000 post  
> boxes in the UK, 50599 seem to have valid postcode data.
> 
> I'm currently geocoding these postcodes using Yahoo's service, and  
> wondered if the resulting longitudes and latitudes would be of  
> interest to OSM and could be integrated. I'm not entirely clear on the  
> licensing of it. Can anyone clarify?

Why not do this all in reverse?

FreeThePostcode is great, but it seems to me that there would also be
value in a (more complete) postcode set which combined their stuff with
data derived from OSM.

Basically, you take an address with street and postcode, use the
NameFinder to find the street, click on it, and the tool marks that
street as having the postcode. (I've been meaning to write this tool for
months but not had time.)

However, for this to work, you need a big file of addresses covering the
UK. Er, hang on a minute, you just obtained one :-)

Gerv





More information about the talk mailing list