On 27/10/14 01:04, Andy Street wrote:
On Sun, 26 Oct 2014 22:41:56 +0000
Chris Hill<o...@raggedred.net> wrote:
>Addresses are allocated by Local Authorities, not Royal Mail. I use
>the address the LA recognise, plus the postcode which, AFAIK, Royal
>Mail do issue.
I was aware that LAs have a role in numbering and naming new streets
but I was unaware that they assigned full addresses.
As I understand it, they only allocate full addresses in the the context
of postal town system. Although postcodes make it less important that
street name be unique within a postal town/London postal district, I
think the local authorities still actually implement that restriction.
I certainly think they will make them unique within an outbound postcode.
Perhaps someone could take pity on this poor simpleton and explain how
this works. I've grabbed my GPS, wandered down "High Street" and added
a waymark outside number 10. When I get back home how do I go about
converting this data into a full address that I can add to OSM?
You cannot use the authoritative database that the local authority uses,
the NLPG, which, incidentally, includes things like sub-stations, garage
blocks, and gas installations as well as postal delivery points. That's
because it is a copyright and monetised database, so you basically have
to rely on local knowledge. Local knowledge is an accepted source for
OSM. Whilst place name signs may sometimes give a clue as to
administrative boundaries, I don't think you can put total reliance on
them. It is like the question with the low emission zone; signs only
tell you the situation at one specific point.
In any case, if people give you a locality based, rather than postal
town based address, they are likely to use estate agents' districts, for
which there is probably no formal database, or historic locality names,
which have no legally defined boundaries. In practice, the advent of
satellite navigators probably means that the post code is what people
will give, even though, if postcodes hadn't existed an OSGB, or even
WGS84, grid reference would have been better suited to the purpose.
Incidentally some local councils do, effectively, make the NLPG data for
their council visible in their online query services, but you still
can't use it for OSM.
Although there seems to be a big hunt on to add postcodes to OSM,
because that is what the general public puts into their satellite
navigators, and I suspect there are lot taken from unacceptable sources,
the real holy grail would be to reconstruct the NLPG.
Looking at the specification, just linked to, it looks like RM post
towns are a key piece of information. The other information is the
administrative unit, which is also something you cannot get from just an
on the ground survey, without asking people. I think most people only
have a vague notion of the administrative unit they are in, even though
it is key to local democracy.
_______________________________________________
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
