It's very official; the Eircode system is designed to be unintelligible apart
from the first part giving the sorting-office area. It has been finalised and
is to role out in 2015. It's most likely defined to meet the needs of An Post,
Revenue and similar authorities.
An advantage of a more intelligible, geographic coding is that you can easily
identify and recall the code for an area. You can specify a location to a
desired degree of accuracy, e.g. 10km, 1km, 100m, 10m.
The particular advantages of the openpostcode system as I see it are: that it
has no proprietary aspect; the resolution depends on the length of code, from 1
to 8 chars (93, 19, 3.7km, 750, 160, 30, 6, 1.2m); the codes are reasonably
short; it describes a geographic box so any location can be given.
The key thing to my mind is that your average person should be able to remember
and use a code with ease to find places. Remembering a GPS point isn't easy. I
can just about remember that Dublin is around 53N 6W and I couldn't put a GPS
box around my local area.According to openpostcode, I live in an area generally
around KFM2, KFM3, KFM7and KFM8. Dublin is pretty much within KF, KG, KL and
KM. There is a syntax for defining ranges, so I live in KFM2::KFM8 and Dublin
is in KF::M.
Another useful outcome is that geographical analysis can be applied where
people are regularly using codes. For e.g. if sales ads specify a small area
for a person's location, then the data can be usefully analysed to give
statistical maps.
On Wednesday, 12 November 2014, 12:35:42, Conor McDonagh
<[email protected]> wrote:
Any interest in the openpostcode system? Have any OSM people looked at it with
view to integrating or using it?
_______________________________________________
Talk-ie mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ie
