OsmAnd is what made me think of it. I'm using that for directions a lot
now, and it's common these days to give a postcode to plug into a sat
nav, but they frequently don't work in OsmAnd.
I was somewhat surprised that it hadn't already been done, and I accept
all the reasons for not doing it.
I'll look into alternatives.
Russ
On 02/10/2019 15:52, SK53 wrote:
I really see no point. The data are already present in Nominatim
(albeit perhaps not up-to-date) and search is the ONLY thing that
so-called postcode centroids can help with. DE24 (Sinfin) was imported
long ago, see this overpass query <http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/MNZ>.
What can be done is attempt to assign postcodes to streets, and
various incomplete efforts have been made over the years. Open Data
provides full addresses for around 70% of UK postcodes (principally
Companies House, Food Hygiene & National Register of Social Housing).
What would be useful is a maintained set of postcode information based
on codepoint open/ONS postcode data/OS Local. The sorts of things
which it would be useful to know are:
* Is the postcode centroid co-located with others (e.g., delivery
offices, some businesses, blocks of flats)
* Can the postcode be unambiguously assigned to a street & post town?
* Is the post code in use or not (ONS is now obviously 8 years old,
but still potentially useful). Greg's FHRS tracker does appear to
indicate a degree of churn with inner-city postcodes (although
some of this will be inadvertent use of more general rather than
specific postcodes by people filling in the FHRS forms)
* Is a postcode the sole postcode for that street?
Somewhere I have an old CPO table with some of this data populated. I
think Geolytix had summary info associated with their post code sector
shape files as well.
Adding addr:postcode to streets which have a single postcode is in my
book fine: numerous LAs put this on street signs (Rushcliffe & Gedling
for sure); it's an intermediate step to adding the addresses to
houses Once the postcodes which obviously belong to a single street
are eliminated it's often easier to work out where the others belong.
Note that other than for FHRS we have no good source for Northern
Ireland postcodes at all. Equally assignment of rural postcodes is
quite a bit harder than urban ones. In re-reading bits of Chris's blog
last night I came across a post of his
<https://chris-osm.blogspot.com/2017/03/have-you-moved.html> showing
that some postcodes move huge distances between releases.
Jerry
PS. The Sinfin postcodes possibly should be removed as they were added
IIRC before Mike Collinson's discussions with OSGB about OS Open Data.
On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 13:44, Russ Phillips via Talk-GB
<talk-gb@openstreetmap.org <mailto:talk-gb@openstreetmap.org>> wrote:
Hi,
I'm wondering if it would be feasible and advisable to import the
UK postcode data from OS OpenData Codepoint
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey_OpenData#Code-Point_Open>.
The licence is OSM compatible. My thinking was that we could
create a node for each data point and set the addr:postcode tag.
This would be useful for routing software like OsmAnd, since it
would allow a user to enter a postcode as a destination.
I'm happy to do the work, but the import guidelines
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines> say that
imports should be discussed on the imports@ list and the
appropriate local communities, hence this email.
Russ Phillips
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