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I completely fail to see what is so important about this. Don't you by definition need to know the postcode of whomever you need to send mail to? If so, what be

by tomjen2 17y ago

I completely fail to see what is so important about this. Don't you by definition need to know the postcode of whomever you need to send mail to? If so, what benefit do you get from this stuff?

anigbrowl 17y ago
The UK doesn't have the same kind of Freedom of Information Act as the US, or the same conceptual approach towards citizens being owners of the government. A lot of stuff that is paid for by taxes in the UK is not automatically public domain, but copyright of the government (or technically, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, the govt. printing bureau) and only available on payment of a stiff fee. Basically the state qua legal entity is much more 'selfish' than in the US, where pretty much anything it puts out is public domain by definition, and it's deeply annoying if you're the sort of UK resident with a presumption of that information wants to be free.
- uhybouy 17y ago
  And is very expensive and restrictive in how you can use it. We licensed the Postal Address File (the list of official correct addresses for each house) and we had to add encryption to our product to stop people being able to extract the raw data from the code. The same applies to Ordnance Survey map data - there are a lot of apps that aren't possible/easy in the UK because of the cost and licensing of the maps that the taxpayer paid for.
pyre 17y ago
'Useful' information could be the ability to do a 'what postal code am I in now' query based on your current GPS coordinates. Or to pull together your own 'postal code map.' Usually postal code data isn't that accurate though. The Long/Lat information is usually just a point in the 'center' of the postal code and most postal codes are irregularly shaped.
- uhybouy 17y ago
  You also need it to generate a "addresses within X miles of Y" type list for a website.
  - pyre 17y ago
    Yea, but you need to combine it with a db of address->long/lat pairs.
ratsbane 17y ago
If you want to display a heat map of incidents/sales/etc where you have an address then something like this is essential. In the US, for example, the Census Bureau's Tiger/Line database is free and maps all the way to street addresses. This UK database isn't nearly as thorough as Tiger/Line but it's much better than nothing.

by tomjen2 17y ago

I completely fail to see what is so important about this. Don't you by definition need to know the postcode of whomever you need to send mail to? If so, what benefit do you get from this stuff?

anigbrowl 17y ago

The UK doesn't have the same kind of Freedom of Information Act as the US, or the same conceptual approach towards citizens being owners of the government. A lot of stuff that is paid for by taxes in the UK is not automatically public domain, but copyright of the government (or technically, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, the govt. printing bureau) and only available on payment of a stiff fee. Basically the state qua legal entity is much more 'selfish' than in the US, where pretty much anything it puts out is public domain by definition, and it's deeply annoying if you're the sort of UK resident with a presumption of that information wants to be free.

uhybouy 17y ago
And is very expensive and restrictive in how you can use it. We licensed the Postal Address File (the list of official correct addresses for each house) and we had to add encryption to our product to stop people being able to extract the raw data from the code. The same applies to Ordnance Survey map data - there are a lot of apps that aren't possible/easy in the UK because of the cost and licensing of the maps that the taxpayer paid for.

pyre 17y ago

'Useful' information could be the ability to do a 'what postal code am I in now' query based on your current GPS coordinates. Or to pull together your own 'postal code map.' Usually postal code data isn't that accurate though. The Long/Lat information is usually just a point in the 'center' of the postal code and most postal codes are irregularly shaped.

uhybouy 17y ago
You also need it to generate a "addresses within X miles of Y" type list for a website.
- pyre 17y ago
  Yea, but you need to combine it with a db of address->long/lat pairs.

ratsbane 17y ago

If you want to display a heat map of incidents/sales/etc where you have an address then something like this is essential. In the US, for example, the Census Bureau's Tiger/Line database is free and maps all the way to street addresses. This UK database isn't nearly as thorough as Tiger/Line but it's much better than nothing.