

UK Postcode coordinates on WikiLeaks - aubergene
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/UK_government_database_of_all_1,841,177_post_codes_together_with_precise_geographic_coordinates_and_other_information,_8_Jul_2009

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ZeroGravitas
It's worth plugging all the ways in which UK citizens can contribute to
independent reverse engineering this info in a clean room manner:

If you've got an iPhone, Android phone or other GPS device:
<http://www.freethepostcode.org/>

If your house was built before 1940 then locate it on an out-of-copyright map:
<http://www.npemap.org.uk/>

Just type in your streetname and postcode:
<http://postcodedb.sourceforge.net/index.php?p=submit>

Identify the location of nearby postboxes:
<http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/locating-postboxes/>

You can see the results here: <http://old-
dev.openstreetmap.org/~random/postcodes/>

Click on the names of the three different sources in the top left to compare
or use the + sign in the top right to switch the underlying map as well.

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jgrahamc
I wonder if there's a 'canary' post code in this data that doesn't actually
exist but could be used to prove where you got the data from. That's the sort
of thing I'd do.

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petewarden
I'm fascinated by Mountweazels:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry>

Anybody have any good examples they've seen on the computer side?

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enf
NAVTEQ's map of San Francisco has a street called "Submarine Bells Way" that
doesn't exist in real life. Tele Atlas's map of Oakland, CA, includes a made-
up street name "Del Norte Drive"

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ionfish
Related: the Free the Postcode [1] campaign is a public-sourced database of
postcode data.

[1] <http://www.freethepostcode.org/>

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kierank
This isn't the full database as far as I understand which maps postcodes to
actual addresses. This leak only deals with coordinates.

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malern
The available columns are

Postcode, IntroductionDate, GridRefEast, GridRefNorth, County, District, Ward,
UserType, GridStatus, Country, WardStatus, NHS_Code, NHS_Region, Long, Lat,
OSRef, Update

You can already get the co-ordinates from a postcode using google maps. So I
can't think of anything massively exciting you could do with this information.
Maybe some sort of offline navigation app.

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skwiddor
how about "what postcode am I in"? when out and about.

also "click on the map, what's the postcode?"

quite handy for getting the area code i.e N1

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pyre
If those are the columns this isn't 'precise' postal code data. The log/lat is
just the 'centroid' of the postal code. At least in the US, most -- if not all
-- postal codes are irregularly shaped, so it's not like you can pull up
precise GPS data on the perimeter of the postal code (i.e. in order to draw it
on a map).

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uhybouy
UK postcodes are equivalent to the 5+4 US zip codes. They list part of a
street, typically 10-20 houses.

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hellweaver666
Just FYI - this won't be much use unless they update it regularly - we have a
churn of about 6000 postcodes a month in the UK (business specific addresses,
new property etc).

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tomjen2
I completely fail to see what is so important about this. Don't you by
definition need to know the postcode of whomever you need to send mail to? If
so, what benefit do you get from this stuff?

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anigbrowl
The UK doesn't have the same kind of Freedom of Information Act as the US, or
the same conceptual approach towards citizens being owners of the government.

A lot of stuff that is paid for by taxes in the UK is not automatically public
domain, but copyright of the government (or technically, Her Majesty's
Stationary Office, the govt. printing bureau) and only available on payment of
a stiff fee. Basically the state _qua_ legal entity is much more 'selfish'
than in the US, where pretty much anything it puts out is public domain by
definition, and it's deeply annoying if you're the sort of UK resident with a
presumption of that information wants to be free.

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uhybouy
And is very expensive and restrictive in how you can use it.

We licensed the Postal Address File (the list of official correct addresses
for each house) and we had to add encryption to our product to stop people
being able to extract the raw data from the code.

The same applies to Ordnance Survey map data - there are a lot of apps that
aren't possible/easy in the UK because of the cost and licensing of the maps
that the taxpayer paid for.

