

Localyser - Crowd Sourced Postcode Data - etherealG
http://localyser.com/

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ZeroGravitas
It would be good to have some clarity on the licence for the data.

I also think crowdsourcing might be a good way to fill in gaps but I'd hope to
see people reaching out to councils, large organisations or other sources of
data to kick start this effort.

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charlesmarshall
Thats a good point about license; I've added it to the site now. I'd guess
creative commons is the best fit, but open to all non-spammy uses.

Other sources would be good, I'll be dropping a message to the people at
<http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/> at lunch.

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ZeroGravitas
<http://openstreetmap.org> would probably also be interested in sharing
address data.

Have you thought about generating the coarser data (country, county, city)
from the location when possible? Or would having a half-filled form be
confusing for users?

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charlesmarshall
At the moment it's just a lookup to the database. It does have the ability to
save and show more fields than whats on the signup form (see the demo -
<http://localyser.com/demo.html>), that form is mainly tailored to match the
how PAF data is returned for an easy drop in.

good call on open street map, i'll try and get in touch.

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ZeroGravitas
Just to be clear about what I thinking, because I'm not sure I expressed
myself well:

If I type in a postcode and house number on a site using the Royal Mail PAF,
then it goes and gets my address. Currently, your service won't. But if I
enter my full address once on one site using it, it'll then be keyed against
my postcode and house number and appear automatically on others.

That very first time I enter a new address you could probably do various
clever things to make entering my address easier. It shouldn't be difficult to
map any postcode to a country (Scotland, England etc.) and other larger
regions. In cases where it's not 100% possible you could probably return a
(potentially incomplete) list of nearby streetnames, towns etc. which could
trigger an autocomplete when the user starts typing the first letter. Once
they've chosen a streetname then that may in turn dictate the rest.

Most of this data could be extracted from OpenStreetmap or directly from the
Ordnance Survey Open Data, particularly Code Point and OS Locator, meaning
you'd only need users to confirm a street name, and enter a house name or
number to get a full record.

(It would be nice to allow users to report errors in the OS Locator street
names too. There's been a few errors found in both sets by comparing the OSM
data against the OS.)

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charlesmarshall
sorry, i was getting the wrong end of the stick on that.

That is a good idea but your original point might be right, empty fields could
be a bit strange. I'll give it a try and see how how it looks (probably not
till the weekend - client work to do).

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ZeroGravitas
Yeah, the interaction design is the hard bit and probably needs tested on
"normal" people before you could be confident that it's actually helpful.

Maybe just having the autocomplete's available to save typing (and typos) and
then only completing the rest of the form once you have the user enter enough
that you're sure you can finish the rest of it (which sometimes might be the
street, but other times the town/county) might work?

I've just realised that unless you know your data was 100% complete you'd not
be able to do a guaranteed correct lookup from the post code and house number
alone, since there may be clashes with houses on nearby streets you don't yet
know about, and even if you present a dropdown list you still need a fallback
form for new data entry. So that's a pretty tricky UI challenge regardless.

Do you have any example data that people can try to see how it works when your
demo recognises postcodes?

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charlesmarshall
Yes, from a front end point of view you can give the demo page a try -
<http://localyser.com/demo.html> \- using B1 1BB

Is that what you mean (still tired, shouldn't drink on school nights!)?

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ZeroGravitas
What happens if someone else lives in "B1 1BB"? It's not obvious that they can
click and then edit the current single entry that it returns.

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vivek47
But ErnestMarples (the website, not the postmaster) says "the Government have
released postcode data, and more besides, for free"...?

<http://www.ernestmarples.com/>

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charlesmarshall
hi, that is postcode to coordinates, the campaign to get the royal mails PAF
data for free failed -
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/22/postcode-
pe...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/22/postcode-petition-
fails-blocked-number-ten)

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pbreit
The site crashes my ipad2 browser.

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charlesmarshall
thats strange, we did have an issue with older versions of chrome so it might
be a problem with certain webkit version, i'll check that out. thanks for
letting me know.

