I've just moved from the UK to Australia, and of all the things I thought I'd miss about the UK, postcodes wasn't high on my list of guesses. Here, a postcode is a 4 digit number. If you're lucky, it has enough granularity to identify your suburb.
So instead, Australia has a highly regularised database for identifying streets and numbers, even to the point of regulating st/ln/av/rd etc.
I think it's a bit unfair to call quantum computing "completely speculative" - there are real quantum computers that you can run programs on today, courtesy of providers like IBM, Microsoft and Amazon - but it'll be a while before they can handle the data volumes necessary for geospatial applications.
Just curious, are these fees a significant source of revenue for the Royal Post? If so, is there a reasonable alternative? Just wondering because I thought I saw something on Twitter about how postal workers over there are being underpaid and the government talking about service cuts.
As someone who moved into a new build a few years ago, you find out quite quickly who is getting monthly, quarterly or annual updates when they still maintain your postcode doesn't exist. I've also used the postcode lookup data, not at household level, with work and there is oddles of useful stuff you can do with that alone.
"the dataset is always changing, as people move house". When anyone moves house, the postcodes of their new house and their old house do not change. So no effect there.
You don't propose how Royal Mail's income stream from the PAF would be replaced.
If the Royal Mail depends so heavily on the PAF revenues to survive, maybe it’s in the wrong business. “Oh no but what about the revenues” was *exactly* the argument put forward by Ordnance Survey when the Free Our Data campaign (🙋♂️) and Tim Watson were pushing it to go to open data. Yet somehow they managed it and the OS hasn’t gone broke. The RM could use the PAF for zero cost *and* wouldn’t have to pay for its upkeep if it were public data (that task would pass to government, or else RM would get a subsidy to continue its upkeep).
You need to think a little more broadly about the topic.
I don't quite understand this remark: "The fees for the PAF is probably why no enterprising nerd has yet done what we all need, and created an app that will send a push-alert to remind you which coloured bins to take out each week" - here in Dublin we get a text from the bin company every week to say what colour bins to bring out. Can the bin company not construct this alert from their own internal database of mobile telephone numbers? Or is there a legal issue in the way?
Interesting question! I think even if such a thing _could_ be done by the bin companies or the local authorities who contract them, the point of liberating the PAF is that we don’t have to wait for them to invent the functionality themselves - with enough open data, it should be possible for someone entrepreneurial to come in and build it themselves, or bake it into their existing products.
Nov 30, 2022·edited Nov 30, 2022Liked by James O'Malley
Take where I live as an example: Stratford-upon-Avon District Council have their own app with push notifications that do bin notifications for us, which sounds wonderful prima facie, but I'm really not sure that local authority level is the correct approach at which to solve the problem. Bin timings can be quite complex, and maybe this example is a little behind the times, but the overall point is that you could deliver great value by maintaining your private metadata to the PAF and distributing it. Bins are just one example. If the data is free, you can start combining arbitrary data from different domains much more cheaply than is currently possible, and aggregating it in fascinating ways.
I've just moved from the UK to Australia, and of all the things I thought I'd miss about the UK, postcodes wasn't high on my list of guesses. Here, a postcode is a 4 digit number. If you're lucky, it has enough granularity to identify your suburb.
So instead, Australia has a highly regularised database for identifying streets and numbers, even to the point of regulating st/ln/av/rd etc.
Of course, that ain't free either....
Coming to this later through your parking platform post… it seems the Consultation is still underway, open until 16th Dec 2023.
And I consider the OS open data reform @charlesarthur ‘s greatest legacy!
All I can say is: sodding Michael Fallon and his right wing economic excesses.
I think it's a bit unfair to call quantum computing "completely speculative" - there are real quantum computers that you can run programs on today, courtesy of providers like IBM, Microsoft and Amazon - but it'll be a while before they can handle the data volumes necessary for geospatial applications.
Just curious, are these fees a significant source of revenue for the Royal Post? If so, is there a reasonable alternative? Just wondering because I thought I saw something on Twitter about how postal workers over there are being underpaid and the government talking about service cuts.
As someone who moved into a new build a few years ago, you find out quite quickly who is getting monthly, quarterly or annual updates when they still maintain your postcode doesn't exist. I've also used the postcode lookup data, not at household level, with work and there is oddles of useful stuff you can do with that alone.
Does UPRN/AddressBase offer a way forward that bypasses PAF?
"the dataset is always changing, as people move house". When anyone moves house, the postcodes of their new house and their old house do not change. So no effect there.
You don't propose how Royal Mail's income stream from the PAF would be replaced.
If the Royal Mail depends so heavily on the PAF revenues to survive, maybe it’s in the wrong business. “Oh no but what about the revenues” was *exactly* the argument put forward by Ordnance Survey when the Free Our Data campaign (🙋♂️) and Tim Watson were pushing it to go to open data. Yet somehow they managed it and the OS hasn’t gone broke. The RM could use the PAF for zero cost *and* wouldn’t have to pay for its upkeep if it were public data (that task would pass to government, or else RM would get a subsidy to continue its upkeep).
You need to think a little more broadly about the topic.
I don't quite understand this remark: "The fees for the PAF is probably why no enterprising nerd has yet done what we all need, and created an app that will send a push-alert to remind you which coloured bins to take out each week" - here in Dublin we get a text from the bin company every week to say what colour bins to bring out. Can the bin company not construct this alert from their own internal database of mobile telephone numbers? Or is there a legal issue in the way?
Interesting question! I think even if such a thing _could_ be done by the bin companies or the local authorities who contract them, the point of liberating the PAF is that we don’t have to wait for them to invent the functionality themselves - with enough open data, it should be possible for someone entrepreneurial to come in and build it themselves, or bake it into their existing products.
Take where I live as an example: Stratford-upon-Avon District Council have their own app with push notifications that do bin notifications for us, which sounds wonderful prima facie, but I'm really not sure that local authority level is the correct approach at which to solve the problem. Bin timings can be quite complex, and maybe this example is a little behind the times, but the overall point is that you could deliver great value by maintaining your private metadata to the PAF and distributing it. Bins are just one example. If the data is free, you can start combining arbitrary data from different domains much more cheaply than is currently possible, and aggregating it in fascinating ways.