[agolio]

I am a bit surprised by how hard this article makes out the problem to be.

Crowdsourcing should make short work of the problem, with the right incentives, which the government will be able to offer.

Additionally private map providers (e.g. Google, Apple) must surely have this data (since they are able to route navigation to private addresses). Why not just negotiate with them?

[ascorbic]

> Additionally private map providers (e.g. Google, Apple) must surely have this data (since they are able to route navigation to private addresses). Why not just negotiate with them?

They licence it from Royal Mail

[normangray]

Probably, but not necessarily.

The article points out that the PAF is kept up to date by virtue of thousands of postmen and postwomen physically visiting the rows in the database on a daily basis, as part of normal business, and logging updates. That level of routine maintenance is what any non-PostOffice PAF alternative would have to also do.

Amazon, and probably Google Maps, are two of the very small number of organisations which _might_ have the resources to build this postcode->GPS mapping, as a sideline to their current business.

They probably do license the PAF, of course, but they illustrate the sort of scale required to assemble that data independently.

[8A51C]

I was a postie for a short while. A particular row of houses had no number 63, 61 and 65 were next door to each other. I always wondered if I posted something to 63 would it land in my sorting rack? Sadly I never tried, but I am fairly sure it would have. I often observed manual intervention to resolve addresses, from years of collective postie knowledge.

[ascorbic]

They allow you to search by postcode, so they license at least that much.

[darrenf]

How would crowdsourcing solve this problem?

> Oh, and it wouldn’t even be legally allowed to include, er, postcodes, as they are specifically owned by Royal Mail

[moring]

How does OpenStreetMap solve it? OSM, more specifically OSM Nominatim, shows postcodes. Example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?lat=53.151778&lon=-1.16...

[darrenf]

I didn't know the answer so I looked it up. Nominatim gets postcodes from Ordnance Survey: https://nominatim.org/release-docs/3.4/data-sources/GB-Postc...

Specifically Code-Point Open: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/products/code-point-open which is updated quarterly, and in turn gets the postcodes from Royal Mail.

[moring]

It seems to me that you can download the postcode list freely: https://osdatahub.os.uk/downloads/open/CodePointOpen

Something is missing here. If OS already has that data from RM and can make it available freely, why would they need to build another database?

[sahmeepee]

Because the OS data doesn't provide addresses, just locations of the postcodes in coordinate terms, so you can't provide the typical website address lookup.

[RossM]

I can't find any good information post-privatisation, but at least before 2013 the postcodes themselves were copyrighted by Royal Mail (likely Crown Copyright as with government data). There were attempts to enforce this in 2009[0]. I suspect the copyright is now owned by Royal Mail Group Ltd.

That aside, a practical issue is that Royal Mail still retains the rights to _allocate_ new postcodes for any new properties. Yet another failure of this particular privatisation.

[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/2009/10/06/uk-royal-mail-uses-copyr...

[epanchin]

Google will surely have a PAF license?