As others have said, having some uniform national scheme of places/areas that each address is assigned to is useful for anyone using addresses. No-one outside the local area will know which postal districts correspond to which areas, or even where many remote postal areas are. Local authorities would be better than postcode districts, but again they may not always be well-known (even amongst local residents), and their boundaries can change. Post towns provide a more recognisable way for people to identify the rough location of an address. They're also good for error checking / correction within addresses.
In any case, if OSM is going to be a useful source of addresses for businesses and the public, we need to replicate the official addresses that everyone is currently used to using. On Mon, 21 Dec 2020 at 16:19, Chris Hill <o...@raggedred.net> wrote: > How are they verifiable? There is no open source that is compatible with > the OSM licence that I am aware of that lets us look up an address. There are plenty of open sources for addresses. They won't be complete, but if you know the postcode of the address you're interested in, in the vast majority of cases you should be able to find an open address that's close enough to be able to infer the post town. In particular, there is an open dataset of addresses for all post office branches: https://osm.mathmos.net/postoffice/data/ . This should cover pretty much all the post towns, and if you add in the (admittedly imperfect) FHRS data, I'd have thought that you should be able to deduce the correct post town in almost every case. Robert. -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
