On 15 Sep, 15:59, Stephen Farrow wrote:
John Rowland wrote:
Bless 'em, they're trying to do something constructive with their spare
time, but they need some way of rooting out the rogue data. I think the
little enclave of RG (which is the Reading postcode) in the middle of
Streatham is my favourite bit.

http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~random/postcodes/

Just like there appears to be an enclave of SK (Stockport) in the middle
of OL (Oldham), and OL4 apparently doesn't exist at all, while there are
two OL15s, and OL2 is apparently centred on the Woodhead pass towards
Penistone.

And it seems that a lot of the sea bed has a postcode too.


It's a nice idea, but the execution's... sad.


The idea of course is to gather otherwise proprietary information by
other means. Royal Mail owns the post code database and AIUI charges a
substantial whack for others to use the data.

I'm pretty sympathetic to the aims of the Guardian's 'free our data'
campaign which is trying to get data such as this held by public
bodies released for free. I guess one could argue that something such
as this OpenStreetMap project could convince the Royal Mail that they
might as well release the data for free (or less) as technological
advances will mean it can be replicated by others anyway (using other
means and without recourse to copying the copyrighted Royal Mail data)
- so in other words its very existence can be used on that side of the
argument

Of course the problem is that there's no guarantee of reliability!
Indeed as a bargaining tool it could somewhat backfire - as the Royal
Mail's counter-argument - against it would run along the lines of
"look at this project, no organisation is going to rely upon such bad
data, people pay for our data because it's reliable and there is a
costs to maintaining it" etc.