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 a location. In the UK postcodes where restricted to a street which meant when computer storage was expensive we used something called a prem code which was the building number followed by the postcode and generated the full address when required. Canadian postcodes can spam different streets especially in areas served by supermail boxes. If I use the example of my own address. The house was built in the City of Cumberland, but my postal address was Navan. Then Canada Post changed the postal address to Orleans which is interesting as Orleans does not exist as a municipality. Apparentyl there are one or two other places in Canada that Canada Post doesn't use the municipality name in the postal address. Currently it is in the City of Ottawa so some mail gets addressed Orleans and some Ottawa. I had an elderly aunt who always addressed my Christmas card to Navan and included the postcode until she died and each year the post office would attach a sticker saying the postal address was wrong. The post code remains the same over all the changes. So yes a postcode can change but from time to time they are more stable than the official postal address. As long as one address contains the postcode then Nominatim will find it which means it can be used for directions. You might be 30 buildings away but you are in the right general area so I think adding them as part of a street address is of value. Cheerio John On Thu, 3 Oct 2019 at 11:24, Justin Tracey <j3tra...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 used as stand-ins, but you can't make assumptions > about continuity or proximity for the addresses they correspond with. > Even though I can't find it explicitly worded that way (i.e., "post > codes are address sets, not locations"), it seems to be the same > situation here. Given that, the most "correct" thing to do would be > tagging postal codes in addresses, and not as distinct entities. > > The Canada Post website has a tool to lookup the postal code for a > particular address, so if it were released, wouldn't the data they use > to supply that information be good enough for this? It doesn't quite > solve people trying to navigate "to" a particular postal code, but it > seems like that's an ambiguous request anyway. > > - Justin > > >
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