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/

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.

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

--

Stephen

I got attacked by a... pencil scribble?

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.

On Sep 15, 2:24 pm, "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/


That's the big floaty one which is still visible when you zoom out.

Those seem to be wildly wrong all over the place, but I think the
individual postcodes when you zoom in are more accurate.

Then again ... not much more. Interesting that there's an SE08 as
well as SE8, an E32 next to E3, two E1Ws in different places, an E61
(wow). Not just in the wrong places, but they don't exist.

If it wasn't for the non-existent ones, I'd wonder if it was a simple
programming bug, and they'd all line up if it was fixed.

On Sep 15, 5:26 pm, MIG wrote:
Then again ... not much more. Interesting that there's an SE08 as
well as SE8, an E32 next to E3, two E1Ws in different places, an E61
(wow). Not just in the wrong places, but they don't exist.

If it wasn't for the non-existent ones, I'd wonder if it was a simple
programming bug, and they'd all line up if it was fixed.

It's really just a technology demonstration to show what can be done
with the data - and also to visualise how good the data is! The
particularly odd bits of data most likely derive from random people
misunderstanding how to enter postcode data.

The postcode stuff isn't a core part of OSM, and is going to be far
harder to survey independently than streets themselves, which we're
doing reasonably well at in some places.

--
Abi

MIG wrote:
On Sep 15, 2:24 pm, "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/


That's the big floaty one which is still visible when you zoom out.

Those seem to be wildly wrong all over the place, but I think the
individual postcodes when you zoom in are more accurate.

Not in my part of the world, they're not (see separate post further up
the thread).

--

Stephen

Lorelai: I'll be in in a minute.
Luke: Who are you talking to?
Lorelai: My other two personalities.

On 15 Sep, 18:31, Abigail Brady wrote:
On Sep 15, 5:26 pm, MIG wrote:

Then again ... not much more. Interesting that there's an SE08 as
well as SE8, an E32 next to E3, two E1Ws in different places, an E61
(wow). Not just in the wrong places, but they don't exist.

If it wasn't for the non-existent ones, I'd wonder if it was a simple
programming bug, and they'd all line up if it was fixed.

It's really just a technology demonstration to show what can be done
with the data - and also to visualise how good the data is! The
particularly odd bits of data most likely derive from random people
misunderstanding how to enter postcode data.

The postcode stuff isn't a core part of OSM, and is going to be far
harder to survey independently than streets themselves, which we're
doing reasonably well at in some places.

--
Abi

All of which sounds fair enough.

Abigail Brady wrote:
On Sep 15, 5:26 pm, MIG wrote:
Then again ... not much more. Interesting that there's an SE08 as
well as SE8, an E32 next to E3, two E1Ws in different places, an E61
(wow). Not just in the wrong places, but they don't exist.

If it wasn't for the non-existent ones, I'd wonder if it was a simple
programming bug, and they'd all line up if it was fixed.

It's really just a technology demonstration to show what can be done
with the data - and also to visualise how good the data is! The
particularly odd bits of data most likely derive from random people
misunderstanding how to enter postcode data.

The postcode stuff isn't a core part of OSM, and is going to be far
harder to survey independently than streets themselves, which we're
doing reasonably well at in some places.

If you're connected with the project, could you get them to put in the
ability for third parties to mark data points as erroneous? Also, the data
entrants should be shown the effect that each new datum has on that map
before they approve it for permanent inclusion in the database.

In article , Stephen Farrow
writes
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.

It also doesn't understand the Cambridgeshire recoding. CBn and CB2n
aren't horribly intermingled. Rather, CBn codes outside the city
boundary are being changed to CB2n codes, sometimes by just adding the 2
and sometimes by more drastic changes.

--
Clive D.W. Feather | Home:
Tel: +44 20 8495 6138 (work) | Web: http://www.davros.org
Fax: +44 870 051 9937 | Work:
Please reply to the Reply-To address, which is:

On Sep 15, 7:06 pm, "John Rowland"
wrote:
If you're connected with the project, could you get them to put in the
ability for third parties to mark data points as erroneous?

I think this is their ambition.

Also, the data
entrants should be shown the effect that each new datum has on that map
before they approve it for permanent inclusion in the database.

That's an interesting idea. One thing that may not be immediately
apparent is that the main postcode database source is trying to be PD,
and is therefore based around people locating their postcode on out-of-
copyright Ordnance Survey maps. Which are therefore 50 years old.
Feeding actual openstreetmap tiles (which are creative commons) into
this process might be considered to make the resulting data creative
commons as well. (Perhaps this is hyper-cautious, certainly the OS
are of the opinion that if you find lots of things on one of their
copyrighted maps and make a table of their coordinates, that's a
derived work. Not sure of any UK caselaw.)

--
Abi