As far as I know Nominatim contains a copy of either the CodePoint Open or ONS postcodes in a table called gb_postcode (see here <https://github.com/twain47/Nominatim/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=gb_postcode>on github). Here's a search <http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=SW1A+2AA&polygon=1&viewbox=50.62692%2C-1.27716%2C50.62930%2C-1.27183>for a well-known postcode, and one can see similar postcodes from the search too. So the base data is there.
However, it seems fairly hit or miss what it finds. For instance SW1A 1AA is not picked up, but my previous example SW1A 2AA is. There are clearly problems with name collisions: M30 ### postcodes seem to get resolved to a road in Hungary. There are some known bugs with the search such as this one <https://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/4910>. AFAIK none of the current principal maintainers of Nominatim (ie lonvia) lives in Britain. Surely the most useful thing would be to resolve this in the Nominatim code base. The second most useful thing would be for people to add postcodes in OSM. We have, I think, somewhere between 5 & 10% of postcodes in OSM. Very roughly we doubled the number of postcodes in the past 3 years, which if continued would suggest 2041 as a rough date for completing them. Jerry On 26 September 2016 at 10:17, Gervase Markham <gerv-gm...@gerv.net> wrote: > On 26/09/16 09:39, Chris Hill wrote: > > Please do not add postcode centroids to the map. They are not real, do > > not exist and do not belong in the OSM DB. > > Just so we know, what is your view of the correct way for OSM search > engines to allow searching on postcode data from around the world? Do > you advocate for each search engine importing each postcode file from N > countries as a separate external datasource? Or are you saying that we > want to make it so that no-one can search for a postcode until someone > has made the effort to find a particular building with that postcode and > added the postcode to the building's address? > > Gerv > > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-GB mailing list > Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb >
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