Personally, I don't think that classifying UPRNs (e.g. historic, parent,
non-addressable etc.) nor publishing dynamically the allocations to the
custodians of batches of UPRNs would detract from the commercial value
derived by Ordnance Survey (OS). I fully understand that as a limited
company, OS is perhaps less motivated to collaborate with the public.
However, public bodies such as the Environment Agency surely have a
broader responsibility to the public?
Why I get on my high horse about this is the knowledge that UPRNs and
related data have errors but perhaps even more tragically, the lack of
openness can lead to direct impact to people's lives. I also realise
that the OSM Foundation is a non-profit organisation whose purpose is to
support the OSM project - my reading is that this is technical rather
than political. I also re-read Owen Boswarva's blog
https://www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-addr1.htm and end up feeling that
the publishing of Open Data is a bit like the comment "When information
is missing, we speculate about what the government might be hiding, or
fill in the gaps with anecdotes."
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/02/government-publish-data-coronavirus-deaths]
I therefore believe that the current situation regarding openness leads
to speculation and as Mark so clearly states to "deliberately minimise
the utility of the Open UPRN database" - the risk is that this sort of
speculation leads to a lack of trust
On 01/08/2020 21:19, Mark Goodge wrote:
On 01/08/2020 20:24, Nick wrote:
As a follow up, Robert Whittaker also submitted an FOI asking for
"... a list of all UPRNs that are classified as 'historic', and a
separate list of all those classified as a 'parent' ....". the
logicto me was that this would help users of Open Data to then filter
these out. The response that this was "exempt from disclosure under
section 21 of the FOIA" - if you are interested follow the link to
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/lists_of_historic_and_parent_upr
In another move, the Environment Agency flood risk website no longer
allows you to link directly to a property by UPRN. You used to be able
to construct a link in this format:
https://flood-warning-information.service.gov.uk/long-term-flood-risk/risk?address=[uprn]
But that no longer works. Now, you have to search by postcode, and
when you select an address the site then sets a cookie which
determines which property details you will be shown. And, checking the
source of the postcode page, it no longer has the UPRN as a variable
for each property. Instead, it's a simple sequential number. For
example, if there are ten properties in a postcode, then the variables
will be numbered 0 to 9.
I'm pretty certain this is deliberate, in order to stop people using
their site as a way to look up addresses from a UPRN. And I suspect
it's part of the same attempts by GeoPlace to deliberately minimise
the utility of the Open UPRN database.
Mark
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