From this week, we're pleased to announce we're including data from a second public domain, collaborative postcode project. This one is the Locating Postboxes project, run by Matthew Somerville. Some of the postboxes they locate have known postcodes, and this data is shown on our site with pink markers.
As with Free The Postcode, this data is imported into our site nightly. Our importer scripts are also open source, and available from here, which people are always welcome to use and improve]]>
This feed is similar to the one provided by Free The Postcode, and is a geo-referenced (geoRSS) feed of the 100 most recently submitted postcodes.
We hope this'll prove useful for those of you who want to update their NPEMap data on the fly, and for other uses we've yet to think of. Please do get in touch if there are other useful formats you'd like to get our data in, if the downloads and rss feed don't fit your needs, and we'll see what we can do.]]>
We've recently set up a mailing list and corresponding forum (both feed data both ways between each other so you can choose your preferred interface) for general discussion about the project, and to try and get to know some of our contributors/users. Hope to see you there!
]]>This time, it's coverage of the Channel Islands. After much searching, we have managed to track down some 1930s maps of both Jersey and Guernsey, which are now scanned and online.
So, if you know of any postcodes for either Jersey or Guernsey, now's the time to add them in!
]]>We still need quite a few Scottish postcodes though, so now's the perfect time to enter the postcodes of places you know in Scotland!
]]>To use this, the base URL is http://www.npemap.org.uk/go/? . Then, put your search term after the ?, such as:
As you can see, it's now possible to search by postcode, 6 figure grid reference, latitude and longitude, and place name (thanks to Geonames).
]]>As you might be able to see from the front page, we now have even more maps of Scotland, all the way up the East coast from England to Kirkcaldy, and then a lot of the mountains and islands further North and in the west.
People in Northern Ireland might have to wait even longer. We have not had any offers of maps that we can use for that region. If you do have any 1 inch to the mile maps that are out of copyright then we are interested in hearing from you.
]]>With that in mind, we've started tracking another measure of our progress. This time, it's the number of postcode sectors we have. (A postcode sector is the prefix & the next digit, eg 'OX12 5').
Currently, our sector coverage is 55%. There's no reason why it shouldn't be almost as high as our prefix figure, so that leaves quite a few more sectors for which we have maps, but no postcodes.
So, that's our next target - get the sector coverage up to the same level as our prefix coverage. Now's the perfect time to start entering postcodes for that little bit further away than you have been already!
]]>Speaking of new maps, we've added a few more places recently. These include The Isle of Man, The Island of Arran, Lanark, Dundee and St Andrews and Aberdeen.
You can see exactly where we have coverage on our all maps overview page. It's worth checking from time to time, as we add new maps more frequently than we post news updates.
]]>The easiest maps to work with are the 7th edition maps, which were created using the National Grid. These can be tiled up, and then used on the site in just the same way as the existing New Popular Edition maps of England and Wales. There are only two snags: Not all of the Scottish 7th edition maps are out of copyright, and we don't have all of the ones that are. If anyone does have any of them, we'd love to hear from them.
Next up, we have the updated Popular Edition maps from the 1940s, which had the National Grid printed over them. These were produced both for the War Office, and for general sale to the public (though we don't think very large numbers of them were). As these maps weren't originally produced with the National Grid, when added it's not completely straight. This means it's more work to tile them, but not impossible.
We have done a trial run with an updated Popular Edition map, and the result (covering Inverness) can be seen here. We are currently getting several of these maps scanned in, so we hope to be able to show maps for some of Scotland in the next few weeks. We don't have these maps for all of Scotland though, so again we'd love to hear from anyone who does.
Finally, a very kind person has offered us all of the Popular Edition maps (from the 1920s) for Scotland, just as soon as he's had them scanned in. Unfortunately, the Popular Edition wasn't produced against the National Grid, so the process of converting the scans into suitable tiles looks like being quite a complex one. So, it may be some time until we can put these maps online.
On a related note, we're still very keen to hear from anyone who has out of copyright 1 inch to the mile maps of Northern Ireland. Do please get in touch if you have some.
]]>Last time we thought we were doing well at just over 1000 postcodes. Now we have 10000!
This is thanks to publicity from The Guardian and BoingBoing among others.
Progress towards collecting a complete set of outward parts is very good. 77% is actually most of the postcodes in England and Wales. It turns out that the list that we generated the list of missing postcodes from was not very accurate — we are probably very nearly there.
I guess our next goal will be the complete set of outward and the number from the inward part, which we seem to be nearly half way towards. This will allow us to achieve accuracy across the whole country of a mile or so for pinpointing any location.
Thank you to everyone that has helped create our data, and do email us if you are using our data so we can share your story on the website (though no guarantees).
Coming soon: An API that allows you to query the location of a postcode using our database.
Latest news on Scotland and Northern Ireland: We have some maps but nothing scanned. The Popular Edition maps are going to be hard to orthorectify as they don't have any national grid lines on them. The War office editions have the gridlines over-printed, but not parallel with the edges of the maps, and the 7th edition maps are not going out of copyright for another 3-5 years. We still have no maps of Northern Ireland apart from our really low-res ones.
]]>You can now see the progress on the front page, where we list some numbers: the number of postcodes collected from this site, the number of unique outward parts (the first half of he postcode) entered on this site, and the percentage of all of the GB outward parts that have been located between us and FreeThePostcode.
As an aid to visualising the data, I have used some code from Chris Lightfoot and fed it our data. You can see the results here. The database it uses is currently updated every hour. You can see the same code running on a complete (non-free) data set linked from this mySociety post.
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