On 02/08/2020 11:58, Jez Nicholson wrote:
My initial thought was also "conspiracy!". Licence problem is more
likely, or perhaps they were concerned that someone might poll the URL
with every available UPRN.
I'm certain that it's been done to prevent people using the EA site as a
means of looking up an address from a UPRN. That's the only plausible
explanation for a change which both makes the site more complex from an
operator point of view (instead of a single database lookup, it now
needs to do several to identify the property from the postcode and
sequence ID) and less useful from a user perspective (because you can no
longer bookmark and share a link to a specific property).
If it is a licence issue, then that's going to have ramifications beyond
the EA. A lot of local authorities use the UPRN in the URL for
property-related information. For example, if you live in Cambridge, you
can check when your bins will be emptied by appending the UPRN to the page:
https://www.cambridge.gov.uk/check-when-your-bin-will-be-emptied#id=200004173390
and if you live in Worcestershire, you can check lots of useful stuff
about your property:
http://e-services.worcestershire.gov.uk/MyLocalArea/MyLocalAreaResults.aspx?uprn=100120673306
It seems to me that this is precisely how the UPRN should be used by
government and other organisations. To quote Matt Hancock from when he
was the secretary of state for DCMS:
"The UPRN is the jewel at the heart of the addressing system. It links
address data across a diverse range of systems and services facilitating
greater accuracy and immediate data sharing"
and the government's own statement on open UPRNs states that
"Users need property and street information with identifiers that remain
the same over time and are easy to exchange between systems."
and
"Systems, services and applications that store or publish data sets
containing property and street information must use the UPRN and USRN
identifiers."
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government/identifying-property-and-street-information
So it seems to me that there should be no licensing issues with using
the UPRN as a unique identifier in a public URL. If anything, the
requirement to use UPRNs in any published dataset seems to pretty much
make it the simplest means of compliance.
(I appreciate that this is going a bit off topic for OSM, so I think
I'll leave it there unless there's anything else directly
mapping-related, but it's worth noting that this change has already been
mentioned on social media and I suspect it's an issue which will gain
more traction over time).
Mark
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