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 other government departments for example are
physical locations.
Open Data would be nice but realistically it isn't going to happen in
the short term.
Having said that what is doable is spotting postcodes that do exist but
are not in OpenStreetMap then tagging a building with an address that
includes a postcode in that postcode.
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.
Cobourg is an example where there are far fewer postcodes than one might
like to see.
Cheerio John
Kevin Farrugia wrote on 2019-10-02 8:53 PM:
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 I've noticed about the data and postal codes in general:
* There is usually one postal code point per postal code, although
there are cases where there can be several points for a postal code.
For example, with some postal codes, if you were to make them
polygons, would generate multiple polygons that are intersected by
other postal codes.
* Postal codes, especially rural ones, pop in and out of existence and
so are a little harder to track and are less permanent than addresses.
* Postal codes will sometimes jump from one side of a road (even
municipality) between years as they try to improve accuracy.
I would check out the Limitations section if you'd like to see more:
https://www.canadapost.ca/cpc/assets/cpc/uploads/files/marketing/2017-postal-code-conversion-file-reference-guide-en.pdf
Forward Sortation Areas do exist as open data through Statistics
Canada - StatsCan generates these FSA polygons based on respondents of
the Census. There are two limitations to this dataset on which I
would advise against importing it into OSM:
1) Since businesses do not respond to the Census, they generally do
not have FSAs for large industrial areas. These areas are covered by
the nearest FSA that they know about/can define, but this can also
cause some movements of boundaries from Census to Census.
2) Because postal codes are created for the purpose of mail sortation
and delivery, the FSA boundaries StatsCan is able to create are not exact.
Here's the reference document if you're interested:
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/92-179-g/92-179-g2016001-eng.htm
If at some point they did release it as open data, it might be decent
enough for the purposes of general geocoding in OSM, I just don't want
people to think it's as well maintained and reliable as some other
types of government data.
-Kevin (Kevo)
On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 20:39, James <james2...@gmail.com
<mailto:james2...@gmail.com>> wrote:
funny you should mention geocoder.ca <http://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, 2019, 8:08 p.m. Jarek Piórkowski,
<ja...@piorkowski.ca <mailto:ja...@piorkowski.ca>> wrote:
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 of the areas.
The website OpenStreetMap.org returns results for some postal
codes
from a third-party database https://geocoder.ca/?terms=1 which
is not
ODbL-compatible either.
Partial mapping is causing some problems with tools like Nominatim
that attach the nearest tagged postcode to search results, often
resulting in improper postal codes for reverse address lookups,
however that is arguably a tooling problem and not an OSM
problem per
se.
This isn't going to be pretty until Canada Post is persuaded
to free
the data. Call your MP, everybody.
--Jarek
On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 17:38, john whelan
<jwhelan0...@gmail.com <mailto:jwhelan0...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> " The number one request on open.canada.ca
<http://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
<jwhelan0...@gmail.com <mailto:jwhelan0...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> 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 appears to be able
to use the postcode if it is entered in the map as part of the
address. Is there any Open Data that might be useful?
>>
>> I don't know if it is possible but could something be used
to extract postcodes in the current map and from there perhaps
we could come up with a list of missing postcodes that need
one address with it in mapped?
>>
>> As a minimum if you could add a few in you know from local
knowledge that might help fill in some gaps.
>>
>> Thoughts
>>
>> Thanks John
>
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