On top of the database they have provided an interface to view the data, interfaces for towns and cities to keep the data up-to-date, free APIs to search addresses and performing geocoding or reverse geocoding (https://adresse.data.gouv.fr/api-doc/adresse) and the data is openly licensed and available to download.

Feeding the BAN has been enforced by law, localities are required to put together and upload their "Base Adresse Locale" (Local Address Database)

The original data was obtained from multiple sources, including "La Poste", the French Royal Mail equivalent, and OpenStreetMap !

My address in France is listed in the BAN… but only to the granularity of my street number (e.g., 123 Main St.).

Unfortunately, that number corresponds to at least 7 different structures, 5 of which are apartment buildings.

Of those 5 buildings, each has multiple stairwells with their own door and no line of communication between them—they might as well be separate buildings.

My particular building has 8 levels with 2 flats per level. No flat has a door number or letter, meaning I must say 'Nth floor, door on the right' to give directions to a visitor. And I could not receive mail until I affixed my name to my postbox on the ground level.

None of that is in the BAN as far as I can tell.

Finally, on OpenStreetMap, the coordinate for the the street number address in the BAN actually corresponds to an island in the street that happens to face a private road that enters the property. There is more than one entrance :)

The BAN actually only tracks down to the plot level, so I assume all your structures are on the same plot. From there on it is the building authorities job to check building plans and to enter the substructures into the cadastre, where they are usually lettered. It's the developer's job to mark the buildings and entries. Sloppy work, all around. So sad.

The challenge illustrated in the blog post is that it's practically impossible to build a really accurate address dataset since the real world is messy for the reasons you listed. Just like falsehoods programmers believe about names [1], you shouldn't put much faith in anything that claims to normalize addresses either.

As other commenters have said in the replies, my situation is not uncommon in Europe.

As they say, 'the map is not the territory.'

[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Still a lot better than some other parts of the world though. In Asia you sometimes have addresses that boil down to the nearest landmark and a phone number for the mailman to call

Different entities will have orthogonal needs when it comes to your address. First responders want a door, the post office wants a mailbox, assessors want a plot number, etc.

I regularly have the problem that deliverers don't read my delivery note and don't listen to what I say on the intercom, and go all the way to the top of the front house before realising I'm in a different building altogether.

This sounds like every day reality.

> Sloppy work, all around.

It's a system that explicitly relies on the cooperation of several independent entities. You were never going to achieve anything better than this.

The entire country of Germany for example. It's super annoying.

Although they have the decency to assign distinct numbers to stairwells and when you register where you live for administrative and postal purposes you give description at which floor and on which side the door is located.

The funny thing is that in Germany you have to pay TV license which is paid "per apartment". But since apartment doesn't have its own number, just street name, building number and freeform description then the authority responsible for collecting tv license fees doesn't know it a fee for this apartment is already being paid. So when you move in anywhere they always send you a letter so that you either start paying or provide TV license I'd number of a person living in this apartment who's already paying.

Everyone in Germany. Units are identified by the surname of the person who lives there. If there's more than one person living there, too bad, pick one or write them all.

Though the later case is bit messy with cross roads. As building can have two different addresses. Or same complex of multiple building have two different addresses for each building. With in my case one having A-C and other D-F stairwells... Oh, and numbers also are not restarted at least sometimes.

I moved from Scotland where there are frequently buildings containing multiple apartments - tenements - there are there are two systems for the labeling of the apartments.

The first is the obvious one, "flat 1", "flat 2", "flat 3" (often this would be written after the number of the street - so flat six at number seven example road would be called 7/6 Example Road).

The second approach is the more physical layout. I used to live in "TFL, 7 Example Street". "TFL? Top flat - left side". You get "GFR" for "Ground-floor right", and similar examples. This worked really well if there were three floors to a building (top floor, middle floor, and ground floor) but the confusion got intensified if the building were higher.

There were times when you'd enter your postcode into an online service, ordering a home delivery for example, or setting up a new electricity contract, and you'd be presented with one/other of these systems. And broadly speaking it would always be the same. When I lived at TFL it was *never* called Flat 6, although I'd often enter it as 7/6 Example Street a time or two just to keep the posties on their toes!

To be honest most of the time the postal delivery people were smart, if I got mail addressed to "Steve, 7 Example Road" it would end up at the correct apartment. Either because the postal delivery person knew - they tended to have fixed routes - or one of my neighbours would do the decent thing and redelivery if it was sent to them in error.

What is "sane" about reality? People want a place to live, they don't care about government databases.

It's online address suggestion/validation/one-time deliveries that don't work well. E.g. Uber Eats and DHL drivers always require a phone call so that I can guide them along the final hundred meters of their delivery. I usually go downstairs and meet them at the curb.

In every place I have ever lived, having a clearly marked addresses and door numbers for apartments is required by the fire code. If there's an emergency that requires a fire or ambulance response, smoke in the air, etc, then "Nth floor, door on the right" is not a good thing to be explaining over the phone.

Yes. In fact the 'résidence' (the conglomeration of apartment buildings) is considered one of the nicer, more desirable, places to live in the city. In the US, each apartment would be called a condominium [1], i.e., most are individually owned and not rented out.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condominium

*coordinates

There are four GNSS constellations, of which GPS is only one...... a statement that negates the fact ones position on Earth may be calculated using a variety of other means.

EDIT: In response to replies below; One isn't questioning the coordinate system (!), rather the assumption as to how they have been calculated.

France still spans the globe, with many places treated as equals to the French mainland.

Something similar happens with GPS coordinates. People are just saying GPS when they mean coordinates. even though the logical thing to do is drop the GPS (neron) and just say coordinates (hudr).

Personally, I think that language is just a bunch of symbols that have no real meaning. Each symbol means something only in a context, no matter how broad or specific. I would argue that it doesn't matter which word is more logical to use because logic is just a part of the context.

But you are right.

I am aware of one utility provider that is locked into a custom network modelling solution that was officially sunset in 2014 and employs 3 ftes to manually create and delete addresses because the old address import tool broke.

Our current building is one of those 56-66 style buildings. Different service use a different number (e.g. postal is 56, gas is 58). We've had a few cases where our address doesn't match so the system rejects us. And when I vote I have to read which number they have upside down!

It took a surprising amount of time to cascade through systems, as in years.

I think we're at +8 years now, and Google Maps still has the old zip and city. Which means many websites do too.

For a while I played around with that kind of data here in Belgium, it's not easy to get it all standardized and "usable".

Most European postcodes are far more precise, often describing a single street, part of a street, or even part of a building. Postcode + house number is usually enough to uniquely identify a mailbox. For example, in The Netherlands on average only 40 people live in each postcode. That makes the dataset far more valuable for geolocation.

Could you provide more information or a source?

Or to put it another way -

UK - 2,643,732 codes, 1 code per 25 people,

USA - 41,700 codes, 1 code per 8000 people,

Germany - 8,200 codes, 1 code per 10000 people,

This means that post-codes are often used as a proxy for an exact location - e.g. if I am going to visit a relative, I can enter their postcode into my sat-nav, and be confident that most of the time I'll get to within a hundred meters of their location.

This doesn't work so well in rural area or on large estates where the access point may different from the location, leading to places sometimes advertising a different postcode to put into your sat-nav (e.g. of where the site entrance is) to that of the location itself.

That said, there are definitely situations where the payment processors don't require the ZIP code - see anecdote 2.

Anecdote 1: When I worked in food service as a kid, I used card terminals that connected directly to a phone line. I remember a couple of times when I entered the ZIP code incorrectly - the card terminal would print out a receipt with an angry message saying the transaction got rejected. So, I know they were using the ZIP code to validate the transaction.

Anecdote 2: With those same card terminals, you could skip the ZIP code and it would run the transaction as usual. But, my manager always told me not to do that. Maybe I never asked him why, or maybe I forgot his answer. Regardless, I don't remember why we he required us to enter the ZIP code, even when it didn't seem to be necessary.

The card is (for card-present transactions) "something you have". And the ZIP complements that. ZIP code is optional, but the merchant gets a data integrity score back from the network ("AVS/address verification service response", from no match to full match), and can accept/decline the txn at their discretion.

Because it's optional and at merchant discretion, all it really does is give the merchant some additional ammunition when disputing a chargeback. And of course to build a demographic database.

No. The only time I have ever been asked for a post code was when a petrol pump in the US demanded my zip code. I have no idea what it meant, I just put some random zip code for the general area I was in and it was accepted. I've never been asked for my post code in Europe; I can't speak for the whole of Europe though, just UK, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway.

1. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-german-postal-code... 2. "There are approximately 16,000 postal codes (Postleitzahlen) in Germany. These five-digit codes cover all areas of the country, including cities, towns, and rural regions.

To break it down a bit further:

1. The first digit represents one of 10 postal regions. 2. The second digit typically represents a sub-region within that area. 3. The last three digits identify specific delivery areas or post offices.

It's worth noting that the exact number can fluctuate slightly over time due to administrative changes, urban development, or postal service reorganization. However, 16,000 is a good approximation for the total number of German postal codes.

Would you like more information about how the German postal code system works or its history?"

It's four digits and two letters. The digits cover an area (can be a city, town, neighborhood) and the letters cover the specific street or part of the street. Technically, they cover a range of house numbers, which in 99.9% of the cases is (part of) a street.

So just like in the UK a postcode is enough to get you pretty close. A postcode and house number will get you to the front door.

To get back to the article. I always feel like the UK manages to take privatization of public services to a next ridiculous level. This being a good example.

Another one is the rail network where the company that owns all the infrastructure and is responsible for maintenance (Railtrack) was fully privatized and even stock listed. This of course did not go very well in as far as actually properly maintaining the network. Resulting in it being nationalized again where now Network Rail is responsible.

In the Netherlands the company that owns all rail infrastructure and is responsible for it (ProRail) is a private company but with just the government as a shareholder. Meaning it is still effectively a public company, so things did result in such dire conditions as the UK.

there was (is) no point for optimization on costs as the profit was a fixed percentage (so it ended up quite the opposite) instead of a price cap. (ideally the cap would be a simple formula based on input prices, to at least make the lobbying transparent. sure, this also has a built in profit percentage, but the important difference is that the profit is not fixed, so the private company is incentivized to push the costs down.)

see https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/energy-bell-the-sketch-of-an-i...

That said, most people don't use the +4 when getting directions or the like, it's just used for postal service.

Even then, to my understanding the USPS has for some time now not relied on zip codes at all. They have a really good address database, they match on that, and then stamp the mail with a routing barcode at the origin post office. The zip code is extra, mail flows just fine if you leave it off.

As I had a smartphone they did at least have a link I could click which would give me my w3w location, which I had to read back to them.

The problem is that w3w is privately owned and has multiple issues with it, as well documented elsewhere.

They could invest in a solution that allows for an OS grid reference to be discovered by sending you a link (a bit like they do with w3w), or some other open (already paid for) reference. That still has limitations if you don't have a smart phone with GPS on it, but I'd argue it's better than what they have right now.

Of course none of this solves for the fact the most useful location dataset in the country is the PAF, and we can't use that without spending a small fortune on licensing it.

When the ambulance arrives wave your hands and say "over here!". So they can do the "last several meters" of navigation by homing on your visual presence.

In the context of navigation that is good enough - if you are within 100 meters you can look to see your destination.

That kind of sanity was, of course, unacceptable to the rest of the world.

Fun fact- some postcodes cover only a fraction of a building. There’s buildings where 3 postcodes are used. Same street number, same main entrance, but different post codes.

Edit: A 2-postcode building example is “M3 7GW” and “M3 7GX”, both go to 55 Queen St, Salford.

The US also has a full 11-digit address code that is printed (by the USPS) on mail in a bar code when you mail a piece. This should take the mailpiece to a unique address.

I worked as a postie for a few weeks as a Christmas job when I was at Uni a looong time ago.

My GF used to write to me regularly (yes, writing letters was a thing back then), we came up a nice scheme: instead of using my actual address she wrote to a made-up non-existant address but with a valid postcode ("501 Any Street, Town, AB1 1AB" on a street with only a dozen houses) that was in one of the streets I'd be sorting letters for/delivering to.

Worked like a charm, would find her letter waiting for me in the pile to be sorted when I rocked up at the sorting office at 5am.

You can pass the law, get sued and pay whatever the PAF is worth. But that's just.. fair? The govnerment spent 5 mio just for a survey concluding that it's impossible to recreate the PAF. So hundreds of millions sounds like a good deal.

If it has knock-on impacts in other areas, it's hard to say, but that's separate to the law.

If Royal Mail put the asset into a US subsidiary then US courts must protect it.

Regardless of what the UK domestic authorities say, very few entities would be willing to risk violating US copyright laws.

Inside the UK, if a law explicitly counteracts, say, an international treaty, the British courts MUST find in favour of British law.

This is true in theory but not in practice. If you’ve been sanctioned by the US then you won’t by able to get a bank account in the UK. Even if you’ve not violated any UK law.

The Americans can give a British bank an ultimatum between dealing in US dollars and dealing with a particular individual. Every bank will always choose the former.

Similarly anything with US assets is subject to the US court system any its interpretation of copyright. Naturally this means US companies need to obey its rules.

But also given the reach of copyright law, so do foreign companies that interact with US ones. Visa, Mastercard, Google, FedEx, and Stripe can’t do business with someone who openly violates US copyright.

So perhaps a local council using self hosted services could use nationalised data but that’s about it.

As I point out, this isn’t “free” because it can invite consequences from other parties. But that’s a different domain to law.

Surely the PAF formed part of the sale price when privatising Royal Mail?

So if you removed it before selling (at a lower price), or you buy it outright after, is there really that much difference making it a profoundly stupid mistake?

To take it would likely require either lengthy court battles or legislation. Given the priorities of the Labour Party, the latter isn't likely to happen within the next 5 years (when they'd have to add it to their manifesto).

Why not? Parliament has the ability to make whatever laws it wants, no?

Taking it would be like taking back a Rolls Royce factory, BP oilfield or other formerly state owned asset.

The state could nationalise the asset in theory, but that’d involve leaving international treaties and causing foreign copyright issues.

Not by default, at least in the US. The database has to actually be more than just a compilation. It's not a high bar to clear, but it's there. Europe and the UK have the "sweat of the brow" doctrine however.

It can be, but that has unknown long term effects. If you do this it shows everyone your government cannot be trusted and so other good ideas will not happen because people cannot trust the government. We probably do not agree on what is a good idea so I'm going to leave this vague - whatever your political side there is a good idea that is suddenly unworkable because the government cannot be trusted to hold their end of the deal.

Parliament absolutely can, legally. The issue is that it’ll set a bad precedent that’ll get brought up by the buyer the next time the government want to privatise something.

Great, maybe they'll be more wary of taking advantage of this kind of blunder if they can get corrected.

The secret to the Royal Mail's success with the PAF, and the reason why only the Royal Mail can maintain the PAF, is that the Royal Mail has people walking and driving to all those delivery points six days every week.

Compare the Freedom of Information requests to Royal Mail from OpenStreetMap contributors concerning the locations of post boxes, which were refused ultimately because that information was handled only by local sorting offices.

Give us your postcode file for free, or we will simply make up a new numbering scheme, send an address card to every house telling them of their new number with their next council tax bill, and postcodes will become a thing of the past.

The new numbering scheme will be unique to each house too, and have a check digit so the number alone is sufficient for 3rd party logistics companies like Amazon to use it for deliveries.

https://publicaccess.glasgow.gov.uk/online-applications/case...

I work in manufacturing and this sounds a lot like the problem of part numbering, and let me tell you, it’s not a trivial problem and the company I work for thought it was and got it wrong.

and the only perfect description of the world is the world, just like on a more trivial scale the only perfect description of what a piece of software does is to run it and see what it does.

So the best I know is to find a level of abstraction that captures enough stability to be useful, with enough flexibility to enable the classification to adopt.

In math, phylogenetic trees might be an example; think Dirichlette processes and exchangeable stochastic processes.

I don't think it's necessarily Thatcherism that made people like this, just a slow erosion of trust that the government has the competency to carry out the tasks of a modern country that's accelerated as time's gone on. Anecdotally Liz Truss's episode as Prime Minister seemed to be the final straw for a lot of people's goodwill towards the government.

It's not entirely without merit, but only because there's a tendency to drastically underfund and micromanage state services. And things like the Post Office Horizon fiasco do not make the government look good here.

On the other hand GDS is excellent - but that's almost entirely as a result of staff professionalism, rather than being driven by whichever ministers had the leadership of the civil service.

An odd outcome of the ID discourse is that we now have an extremely high tech biometric identity system .. but only for immigrants.

It was changed from a government department to a statutory corporation in 1969. It was then changed to a public limited company in 2000.

Furthermore:

- Post Office Ltd owns and runs Post Office Counters Ltd which runs the post office branches. This is the company that uses Horizon (since 1999)

- Royal Mail delivers mail to addresses, and owns the Postcode Address File. Royal Mail was separated from the Post Office and privatised in 2013. It has never used Horizon.

Horizon is an EFTPOS/accounting system, nothing to do with mail delivery. It was introduced to the Post Office in 1999 after Fujitsu/ICL were originally commissioned by government to build an accounting system for the Benefits Agency, and it was so awful and buggy the Benefits Agency rejected it, so the government asked them to retool it for the Post Office.

The rest of the UK government is capitalism on stilts, and is forever outsourcing everything to the private sector. There was a scandal when the outsourcing firm Carillion went bankrupt - we learned that the cleaners in Parliament were under four layers of subcontracting - i.e. four sets of middlemen taking a cut between the government paying for cleaning Parliament and the people who actually do the cleaning. One of those middlemen was Carillion, which had just paid £79m of dividends to investors and then collapsed with £7000m in liabilities and £29m cash. That's because capitalism is perfectly efficient, and it's not just a bunch of crooks cooking the books to appear to be perfectly efficient, right?

Whether you view this as a mistake of over investment or under investment, it’s clearly a mistake of some sort.

See also HS2.

Not sure that's a precedent I'd want set in a common-law country, and not sure that would hold up to judicial review under common law.

The government made a bone-headed mistake when they included the postal data as an asset in the sale. The solution is for them to admit their mistake and pay for it. It's fiat money anyway, so it doesn't really cost anything. Having them abuse their government power to cover up their mistake is not an approach I endorse.

Not that this hasn't happened before, think postal scandal or yesterday's comments on the Hawke and Curacoa https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41285275

In any case, nationalisation has a long history in the UK, so it would hardly be setting a precedent.

One way or the other, a private asset must be either nationalised or compelled to be released.

Gradual renationalisation of the rail network was in the manifesto. That's not particularly contentious, as rail franchises have fixed terms. But the manifesto is all about steadying the ship, and militant nationalisation risks spooking investors, so whether the government has any appetite to nationalise anything by fiat is questionable.

Nonetheless, there's public support for renationalisation; and, for such a low-value asset, this might be a nice test of the waters.

So there's already data for people who want to know postcode AB10 1JL corresponds to the area around 57.14677,-2.09873

The PAF is a more detailed data source, as seen in https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode which can tell you that AB10 1JL specifically covers the addresses

102-104, Union Street, Aberdeen

82, Union Street, Aberdeen

Timpson Shoe Repairs Ltd, 86 Union Street, Aberdeen

Smart Mobile, 88 Union Street, Aberdeen

92 Union Street, Aberdeen

98 Union Street, Aberdeen

The PAF is useful if you want to provide a "quick address entry" option on your website - and to validate address data. But if you just want postcode-to-location conversion, that info is already available.

I suppose this is encouraging! It shows that the forces of openness are gaining ground in this battle.

One example I often encounter myself is Google Maps trying to geolocate my address (city, street name, house number), and then reverse-geolocate that into my postcode. Which sounds like it would work - until you realize that the postcode polygons can overlap. I live in a building where (roughly) each floor has its own postcode, so whenever I try to fill in my address on a website which uses Google's API, it'll "helpfully" auto-fill or "correct" my postcode from 1234AB to 1234AZ. It'll essentially pick a random postcode, because all of them share the same coordinates!

That's Really Really Bad, because the postcode plus house number combination is supposed to uniquely identify a mailbox: it's only a matter of luck that the house numbers aren't reused in the set of postcodes used for my building. They could've just as well reused the numbers at the individual building entrances...

Meanwhile Ireland introduced Éircodes less than 10 years ago, chose an opaque format that uses a central database that you have to pay for access to for anything more than a handful of lookups, only covers homes (so you can’t give an eircode of a park, or a walk). It’s pretty much what you’d expect to be designed by a modern government.

I’d expect a corporation like ibm etc to design the total mess we see with any large project

Scotrail is run by the Scottish government and has been steadily electrifying the Scottish rail network and because of the slow and steady nature of the work, between them, Network rail and the OHLE contractors they have got the cost for this down to 5 times less per km than typical UK costs previously e.g. the great western main line.

The moral of the story is get good people, give them stability and a clear goal and they will do great work. It doesn't really matter if they are working for the government or the private sector.

Most of my street is a single post code. Once upon a time it was a street of single family dwellings, so that's maybe a 3-4 dozen homes, but this is a city suburb so densification means some of those homes were modified and cut up to form flats, one large family home becomes six smaller homes - and some were purchased, knocked down and replaced by buildings which don't look out of place but aren't what they were before. I live in a purpose built four storey block, but it's designed to look superficially like a big house, the bottom floor is below street level (it faces out over the hill), the top has only loft-style windows at the front like somebody did a loft conversion.

It's all still one postcode though, so I share a code with maybe 100+ households. Recoding is disruptive and it's not really worth it, so they mostly don't do it.

Remember for actually delivering the post the postcode is just a convenient human readable part of an address, the machines (with occasional human help) turn any arbitrary address into a unique destination code, and then that's literally barcoded (albeit not in a code you're used to from like UPC etc.) onto the post. So for the Royal Mail the postcodes not being as descriptive as they were fifty years ago isn't a big problem.

Take some mail you've received, preferably over several days and study the outsides carefully. Two fluorescent orange bar codes have been jet printed onto the mail during sorting. The upper code is "just" a temporary unique ID, every piece of mail in the sorting system is issued a code, when they run out they start over, this helps with debugging and statistics. The lower case is in some sense the successor to the postcode, it'll be identical for every item delivered to the same address and distinct for other addresses. In fact it's encoding the "Delivery Point" which is what PAF handles, the location to which the Royal Mail employee delivers mail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM4SCC

The use of these "real" postcodes also enables the Royal Mail to more readily accede to impractical "vanity" postcode requests. If the rich people in this part of Dirt Town think they ought to have postcodes from the adjacent and posh sounding Upper Niceton, RM can allow that, because in reality their teams are working from the purely numeric code which will still treat all these new "Upper Niceton" homes as being where they actually are, in Dirt Town.

I'm sure there is a "falsehoods programmers believe about addresses" somewhere.

  Foo House
  Townland
  Large town somewhat nearby where the mail comes through but only tangentially near the actual house
  County Bar

There's a bank address in my town: PTSB Kennedy Road Navan Co Meath

Kennedy Road is about 2 blocks long with ~ 30 shop fronts, and there are numbers on all but one of them.

Not really optional in most cases if you're not actually in the "large town somewhat nearby". I would say the large town part is more optional.

You're not going to get post delivered to "Lakeview, Cavan, Co Cavan", but you should be ok with "Lakeview, Killeshandra, Co Cavan".

In Meath, there's a House address near Garlow Cross where it's Foo House, Johnstown, Co Meath, but Johnstown is 7km away or so.

For those who have not been near there -- It's karst topography with basket of eggs hills where the water table is above ground in many of the valleys.

But apparently that would make data analysis to complicated.

The address field names are fairly standardized[0] and Google has an open dataset (used by Chrome and Android) describing which countries need which fields[1].

I have an older PHP library[2] and a newer Go library[3] that build upon this, while crowdsourcing fixes (since Google hasn't updated their dataset in a while). The Go library allows me to serve all address formats and state lists in a single HTTP request, which can then power a very fast JS widget.

[0] Initially by the OASIS eXtensible Address Language (xAL) which trickled down into everything from maps to HTML5 autocomplete.

[1] https://chromium-i18n.appspot.com/ssl-address

[2] https://github.com/commerceguys/addressing

[3] https://github.com/bojanz/address

Eircodes are better than postcodes, in that there's 1 per building/address/apartment, however they're discontinuous, so adjacent buildings will have distinctly different eircodes.

The article highlighted the difficulty of shopping centers and apartment buildings, from my experience trying to validate a large number of Eircode <-> addresses for a project, this is definitely an issue. The worse issue is that there's no way to just send someone out to check, because the eircode isn't like a house number that's posted somewhere. (Leaving aside the problem that valid Irish addresses can have no numbers outside of the eircode, and eircodes are a recent, and therefore non-traditional addition)

> The worse issue is that there's no way to just send someone out to check, because the eircode isn't like a house number that's posted somewhere. (Leaving aside the problem that valid Irish addresses can have no numbers outside of the eircode, and eircodes are a recent, and therefore non-traditional addition)

The HSE National Ambulance Service (NAS) National Emergency Operations Centres (NEOCs) have a GIS package that resolves Eircodes (and other traditional and colloquial addresses) to actual buildings and building entrances in real-time, which actually quite impressive. The directions can be transmitted to ambulances and other assets in real-time and has reduces delays in clinical services due to address confusion enormously since 2016.

So the country is capable. Eircode is what we chose as a country, not what we were limited to.

I spent almost a year having to enter my address manually because the postcode DB — or whatever old version pets.com, cameras.com, and looroll.com had — lagged behind the reality of my infill bungalow for seemingly forever. I’m 8A godamnit, not 8. (Thank you Mrs. No8 for accepting my packages throughout those dark months btw.)

It’s just like tzdata. A precious resource not just because it compiles the history of geopolitical wallclock settings, but also because it is meticulously updated, on time and on budget.

It’s all very well liberating PAF.v2024_08finalfinal_v3_final.doc, but who is also going to keep it up to date?

I’m not a hater, just a realist. TFA is spot on: we’ll never be able out compete with or recreate or leak a sufficient version of the PAF. It, and it’s entire infrastructure, needs to be wrested into public hands ASAP. And we should be prepared to fund the updates.

G-NAF is the equivalent to the UK's National Address Gazette.

It's a separate body of data, that sometimes disagrees with the "source of truth" that is Australia Post, and all the post systems that rely upon them.

For example, it took two years for G-NAF to notice that Winter Valley, Victoria, is not within 3356, but actually has its own brand new post code of 3358.

We have a very different model for access to data produced by government agency use to that in the US.

USGS Topographic maps: public domain / free

UK OS Topographic maps: paid access, and it's not cheep

US National Weather Service: Public domain / free commercial use

UK MetOffie: Payed access for commercial use

The USGS is funded by some shard of the US federal budget, and does commendably good stuff with the budget it gets; it's there for both high-minded and commerce-supporting reasons. The OS is now (in a sequence of reorganisations from 1990 to 2015) a private company with a government-owned golden share, and is expected to be revenue-positive. The fact that it has more money per square metre of country, means that it's able to be _very_ thorough, mapping down to the level of individual bits of street furniture.

Sidenote: the context I was hearing this included a talk by someone from OS describing using reasoning software to do consistency checking of their GIS: for example, if you find a river bank in the middle of a field, something has been mislabelled. I thought that was cute.

When you buy a data product from OS, you're buying some subset of the layers of the database.

As the other reply pointed out, some of these layers are available for free, and in the last few years there's been some review/churn/debate in the data subsets made available that way (I see there are more details on the Wikipedia page). One can form a variety of opinions on whether those subsets are as big as they could or should be, but there does seem to be a substantial point that the level of the detail in the master map is there because it's profitable for the company (and thus income-generating for the government) to develop it from surveys, and it wouldn't exist otherwise.

I think the Met Office is organised in a similar way.

There are a number of questions of principle and practice here, but the OS seems to me to be claimable as an example (rare, in my opinion) of a privatisation which has produced net positive outcomes.

Somehow these idiots managed to strike a deal to keep the sovereigns figurehead on stamps (which has no economic value whatsoever, and actually the Crown should be compensated for this) but, in this data age, didn't safeguard such a critically important database to e-commerce

It's like selling off the Tower of London because you can't afford to repair the roof and forgetting you left the crown jewels inside

Even in the states, the USPS has resisted privatization this far. For the love of god I hope it continues to. Protect our boys n girls in blue and tell your congressman you want postal banking.

The tories, as a matter of religious faith, see privatised => efficient, whilst being unclear on the difference between 'efficient at creating shareholder value' and 'efficient at serving the public good'. The political mood music, over the last few decades, has meant that the Labour party has repeatedly found itself obliged to say positive things about privatisation, as part of the process of Being Sensible About The Economy (there is a much longer alternative version of this comment!).

The US -- the world temple of capitalism -- seems to be oddly principled (viewed from outside) about keeping certain things such as the postal service, or USGS, as part of the service to the public realm.

The one service probably immune from privatisation is the Health Service. It's only the most frothing-at-the-mouth right-wingers, the provocateurs just one step away from a rabies injection, who'd even admit out loud to a desire to do that. A politician talking about privatising the NHS would I think be pretty much equivalent to a US libertarian politician talking about privatising the armed forces.

(there's a longer version of that comment, as well...)

The Post Office (shops, services, government forms, etc.) is still fully government-owned. It's the Royal Mail (delivery) that was privatised. They used to be the same company but split in two before Royal Mail was privatised.

Just have someone exfiltrate the file and post it on Anna's Archive. Or extract them from Open Street Map.

Just bypass the Royal Mail altogether.

Or just ignore the postcodes. For most private individuals an ordinary street address works perfectly well and is needed anyway even if the postcode is provided.

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?

They licence it from Royal Mail

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.

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

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...