On 04/10/2019 20:28, Frederik Ramm wrote:
Hi,
On 10/4/19 20:51, Mark Goodge wrote:
The reality is that people expect postcodes to be a functional
search term on online mapping, at least in the UK,
You *are* ware that UK post codes are fully findable on the OSM
website and any site that runs the Nominatim geocoder? It must have
been mentioned somewhere in this thread. This means that our web site
and anything that uses Nominatim for geocoding already knows UK post
codes without importing them to OSM.
Yes, but OSM is the data, and the data needs to stand alone without
needing Nominatim as a front-end. It's easy to add postcode search to
OSM by means of an add-on system. But not every use of OSM data will
include those add-ons.
With an automated import, OSM can be as up to date as the latest
release of CPO/ONSPD. And that's a positive selling point for our
data.
The notion that automated imports could set OSM apart from the
competition flies in the face of what many of us believe to be OSM's
unique value proposition. We don't usually brand ourselves as "the
database with the better imports" and we're unlikely to ever be a
match to the giants on the field of engineering.
Automating a postcode import is trivial. The reason Google is slow to do
it isn't because it's an engineering challenge, it's simply because they
don't consider it a priority.
Richard makes a good point (that if anything, a manual process that
allows our human editors with local knowledge - who are what really
sets us apart - to verify and improve the data would be preferable)
but also a questionable one (in suggesting that there are 195
countries in the world having some form of post codes that is also
available as open data - the number is probably one-digit).
I would like to applaud Ken for his roll-up-sleeves approach. It
shouldn't be too hard to find one house for each of the post codes
in your local area and add the post code to that, which will
ultimately make every post code findable without actually having to
add something as synthetic as a centroid.
There are, typically, between 1,000 and 3,000 new postcodes added every
month, and postcodes are deleted every month, too. Sometimes, there's a
mass reorganisation of postcode data which can involve additions and
deletions of the many tens of thousands in one month. I don't think that
OSM has anywhere near the number of human editors necessary to keep up
with that manually.
Mark
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