Localyser - Crowd Sourced Postcode Data
localyser.com
localyser.com
I also think crowdsourcing might be a good way to fill in gaps but I'd hope to see people reaching out to councils, large organisations or other sources of data to kick start this effort.
Other sources would be good, I'll be dropping a message to the people at http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/ at lunch.
Have you thought about generating the coarser data (country, county, city) from the location when possible? Or would having a half-filled form be confusing for users?
good call on open street map, i'll try and get in touch.
If I type in a postcode and house number on a site using the Royal Mail PAF, then it goes and gets my address. Currently, your service won't. But if I enter my full address once on one site using it, it'll then be keyed against my postcode and house number and appear automatically on others.
That very first time I enter a new address you could probably do various clever things to make entering my address easier. It shouldn't be difficult to map any postcode to a country (Scotland, England etc.) and other larger regions. In cases where it's not 100% possible you could probably return a (potentially incomplete) list of nearby streetnames, towns etc. which could trigger an autocomplete when the user starts typing the first letter. Once they've chosen a streetname then that may in turn dictate the rest.
Most of this data could be extracted from OpenStreetmap or directly from the Ordnance Survey Open Data, particularly Code Point and OS Locator, meaning you'd only need users to confirm a street name, and enter a house name or number to get a full record.
(It would be nice to allow users to report errors in the OS Locator street names too. There's been a few errors found in both sets by comparing the OSM data against the OS.)
That is a good idea but your original point might be right, empty fields could be a bit strange. I'll give it a try and see how how it looks (probably not till the weekend - client work to do).
Maybe just having the autocomplete's available to save typing (and typos) and then only completing the rest of the form once you have the user enter enough that you're sure you can finish the rest of it (which sometimes might be the street, but other times the town/county) might work?
I've just realised that unless you know your data was 100% complete you'd not be able to do a guaranteed correct lookup from the post code and house number alone, since there may be clashes with houses on nearby streets you don't yet know about, and even if you present a dropdown list you still need a fallback form for new data entry. So that's a pretty tricky UI challenge regardless.
Do you have any example data that people can try to see how it works when your demo recognises postcodes?
Is that what you mean (still tired, shouldn't drink on school nights!)?
each postcode in the UK has multiple addresses, but generally a postcode + street number is unique. this data however is held by Royal Mail, and costs a lot of money to license. we believe this is incorrect and are hoping to crowd source the same data for use for free.