Comments on: Royal Mail Rub Our Noses in it

By: Philip Hands

Philip Hands — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:17:29 +0000

Having looked into that a little more there’s a problem with that idea. Openstreetmap is CC-by-sa licensed, whereas freethepostcode is Public Domain.

Grabbing locations off of the map could be considered to contaminate the freethepostcode with CC licensed data.

It seems very likely that all openstreetmap contributors would be happy for data derived in this way to be released into the public domain, but how does one track them all down *sigh*

By: Philip Hands

Philip Hands — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:56:11 +0000

For many uses of this data, the location referred to by the post code is the typist’s home or workplace. You may not know where that is, but they do. So, why not try using freethepostcode (and/or the postcodedb if that ever takes off) and when that fails, ask them. In the case of freethepostcode, you need their location, and you can probably get to within a few miles with the current state of the database, so then you ask them to point it out on a page from openstreetmap, initialised to your nearest guess.

You’d also need to ask them for permission to submit the data (and their email) to freethepostcode afterwards of course (or agree something else with freethepostcode), but pretty soon that would fill in the gaps in the knowledge.

Cheers, Phil.

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:32:09 +0000

http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/blog/?p=511 summarises a cost analysis. Apparently it would be more profitable if Royal Mail didn’t restrict the database.

By: MJ Ray (mjray) 's status on Wednesday, 21-Oct-09 07:23:43 UTC - Identi.ca

MJ Ray (mjray) 's status on Wednesday, 21-Oct-09 07:23:43 UTC - Identi.ca — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:23:50 +0000

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