Re: [Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

2019-10-03 Thread john whelan
Canadian Postal Codes in urban areas are blocks of roughly 50 buildings which makes them extremely interesting to use for GIS studies. Average income etc. Both in the UK and Canada many people would rather type in a 6 character code than a street address with city when looking for directions to

Re: [Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

2019-10-03 Thread Justin Tracey
In the US, ZIP Codes (the US postal code equivalent) are frequently emphasized to not correspond to geographic locations, but sets of addresses. Of course they frequently cluster according to geography (and the prefixes are indeed assigned to states and regions within the state), and are often

Re: [Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

2019-10-03 Thread James
>For example if K4A 1M7 exists in the map then it would be reasonable to assume that K4A 1M6 - 1M1 should also exist so could be looked for. Not necessarily. The first three characters are province, region indicators. The last three are based on Canada Post's routes/delivery zones. They create

Re: [Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

2019-10-02 Thread Kyle Nuttall
I've found a good resource to use is a business website. Particularly a store with multiple locations, a mall directory, or a BIA. They have several postal codes that are associated with their respective addresses. Unfortunately it does require manual work (or you could pair a scrapper with a

Re: [Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

2019-10-02 Thread John Whelan
I had long discussions with Canada Post about postcodes years ago.  I was working with Treasury Board standards group at the time looking at addressing standards and I'm very aware of the limitations. Rural post codes are very definitely an issue and not all postcodes used by Stats Canada and

Re: [Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

2019-10-02 Thread Kevin Farrugia
I don't want to rain on the postal code party, and maybe I'm a little jaded from using the data, but I use the Postal Code Conversion File (PCCF) from Statistics Canada (who get it from Canada Post) at work. In general I would say that the postal code points are in mediocre shape. Some things

Re: [Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

2019-10-02 Thread John Whelan
I seem to recall the case was dropped as well. Having sad that I think the best way forward is " The number one request on open.canada.ca is to open the postal code database.  Feel free to add your vote. https://open.canada.ca/en/suggested-datasets; and also add in a

Re: [Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

2019-10-02 Thread James
funny you should mention geocoder.ca The owner of that website was sued by Canada Post because he was crowd sourcing postal codes. Just recently (2 ish years ago?) they dropped the lawsuit because they knew they didnt have a case(He came to the Ottawa meetups a couple of times) On Wed., Oct. 2,

Re: [Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

2019-10-02 Thread Jarek Piórkowski
Yeah, Canada Post currently considers postal codes their commercial data. Crowd-sourcing all or a substantial amount of full codes seems infeasible. Crowd-sourcing the forward sortation areas (the first A1A) seems difficult since verifiability is going to be a problem especially around the edges

Re: [Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

2019-10-02 Thread john whelan
" The number one request on open.canada.ca is to open the postal code database. Feel free to add your vote. https://open.canada.ca/en/suggested-datasets; Cheerio John On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 13:32, john whelan wrote: > On the import mailing list there is a proposal to import postcodes in the >

[Talk-ca] Postcodes in Canada

2019-10-02 Thread john whelan
On the import mailing list there is a proposal to import postcodes in the UK one of the reasons given was that many like to input a postcode to get directions on smartphones using things like OSMand. I don't think an Open Data source with the correct licensing is available in Canada but OSMand