Greetings all, For the last week I've been working on a sort of 'replacement' for the Royal Mail's postcode/address finder (you know, the one with the ~5 queries a day limit without an account) [1] but based entirely on data in the OSM database. You can find my site at [2].
It's features are: - Covers the whole of Britain (based on the Geofabrik great_britain.osm.pbf file from 15 March) - Can search by full or partial postcode - Can search for street and house number or just for street name - Largely based on the Karlsruhe Schema (including the associatedStreet relation for grouping houses together) - Has a tagging guide [3] to help document the tags the system uses - Fully open-source [4] - 'Error' reporting - these are currently only shown at the bottom of the page with the error. I will probably make a map out of this at some point. I currently measure about a quarter of a million 'address points' - that is objects with a postcode or with both a housenumber and a street (associates street or addr:street). This compares with the reported 28 million entries in the Royal Mail's PAF. I will provide a more detailed breakdown when I get a chance. Of course in its current state it's not a competitor for the PAF but I'm hoping that the "if you render it, they will map it" rule will apply here to encourage people to add postcodes and addresses. I guess a good postcode to look at is B72 [5] given the excellent work done at [6]. I've also been doing a lot in CV4 so that should be quite good too. Please take a look a the site and give me any feedback on anything you like or don't like. As I said this is only about a week's part-time work so it's unpolished in many places but I figure that RERO is a good idea here. There are a number of features I am still planning on implementing which are recoded at [7,8]. The first time you connect to the site it might take a while to load but after that it should be snappy enough. Regards, Matt Williams http://milliams.com [1] http://postcode.royalmail.com [2] http://milliams.dev.openstreetmap.org/postcodefinder/ [3] http://milliams.dev.openstreetmap.org/postcodefinder/tagging/ [4] http://gitorious.org/postcodefinder [5] http://milliams.dev.openstreetmap.org/postcodefinder/search/?postcode=B72 [6] http://blog.mappa-mercia.org/2011/02/whats-in-postcode.html [7] http://gitorious.org/postcodefinder/postcode-analyser/blobs/master/TODO.rst [8] http://gitorious.org/postcodefinder/postcodefinder/blobs/master/TODO.rst _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
