UK Postcode coordinates on WikiLeaks

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

by aubergene • 17 years ago

55 29 17 years ago

wikileaks.org

kierank• 17 years ago

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

malern• 17 years ago

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.

skwiddor2• 17 years ago

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

ntoll• 17 years ago

such a shame...

ZeroGravitas2• 17 years ago

I think this is actually better. This is the secret source which is referred to in order to create, but doesn't include, the PAF file which maps postcodes to addresses. The PAF file is however easily available, though under a licence, and therefore is regularly leaked.

http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/jump2?mediaId=400085&...

ionfish• 17 years ago

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

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

ZeroGravitas2• 17 years ago

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.

jgrahamc• 17 years ago

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.

aubergene• 17 years ago

someone who has a legal source could do a diff against this and see if that's the case

uhybouy6• 17 years ago

The 'legal source' would have to have the canary address - so you could tell if it was used.

Unless somebody thinks this was a deliberate leak to poison the free data - in which case it would have it's own canary address

petewarden• 17 years ago

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

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

enf• 17 years ago

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"

theblackbox• 17 years ago

This was the standard method of "copywriting" Maps - put in an artificial or geological feature that isn't there. You know who's been stealing your data then - The "There be Dragons" hack

tomjen2• 17 years ago

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?

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

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.

uhybouy6• 17 years ago

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.

pyre5• 17 years ago

'Useful' information could be the ability to do a 'what postal code am I in now' query based on your current GPS coordinates. Or to pull together your own 'postal code map.'

Usually postal code data isn't that accurate though. The Long/Lat information is usually just a point in the 'center' of the postal code and most postal codes are irregularly shaped.

uhybouy6• 17 years ago

You also need it to generate a "addresses within X miles of Y" type list for a website.

ratsbane• 17 years ago

If you want to display a heat map of incidents/sales/etc where you have an address then something like this is essential. In the US, for example, the Census Bureau's Tiger/Line database is free and maps all the way to street addresses. This UK database isn't nearly as thorough as Tiger/Line but it's much better than nothing.

hellweaver666• 17 years ago

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).

UK Postcode coordinates on WikiLeaks

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