First Crowdsourced, Open Data Address List Launches In the UK

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 15, 2015 @02:49AM from the ok-now-start-on-a-cell-phone-directory dept.

The internet is a great place to search for some kinds of information; Amazon (or L.L. Bean, or Digi-Key, or any retailer, really) do their best to connect you with all the products in their databases, and for lots of other search topics, the usual handful of general purpose search engines can ferret out answers based on your keywords. Addresses are sometimes harder to search, but in the UK at least that might soon be much easier: An anonymous reader writes The London based startup and open data advocacy organization Open Addresses UK wants to change all of that by inviting the public to collect and validate housing addresses to build the biggest UK open address dataset ever. To do so, they launched UK's first open and free address list on Wednesday, calling on individuals and companies to crowdsource information." What if you want the equivalent of an unlisted number, though?

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Re:UK Post Office already does this by rapiddescent · 2015-01-15 03:39 · Score: 4, Informative

The commercial arm of the Royal Mail (not PostOffice Ltd) own the intellectual property of the PAF (Postal Address File) that has a strict data structure of how to store an address for verification purposes. See the PAF Digest PDF for a full 200 page specification of how to write a postal address.
important for orgs that process addresses and how to process data items like a "double dependent locality" and so on. many big UK companies totally fuck up addresses even though this is specified.
The main problem with this is that the Royal Mail was privitised so this publically funded data source has now been commercialised and the IPR owned by a company thanks to the tories.