GeoDjango and the UK postcode database | Hacker News Reader

GeoDjango and the UK postcode database

chris-lamb.co.uk

30 pointsgthank10 comments

Background for non-UK residents: the postcode database is controlled by Royal Mail and isn’t public domain. If you want to use the data you must licence it at fairly expensive rates first. There’s a project to create a crowdsourced clone of this data ( http://freethepostcode.org/ ) and it’s beginning to get there, but it’s by no means complete.

postcode database is controlled by Royal Mail and isn’t public domain

That makes no sense at all to me. How the heck can you function with people's addresses half secret?

Strange.

The data isn't secret, but commercial access to the database is restricted. If you want to find a few postcodes (I think <=5 per day) it's free. More, or if you want a manipulatable copy of the dataset you need to pay.

Again, crazy.

The only thing it does is keep postcode methods of geo-location unavailable to the UK public. Canada, Australia, the US and most of Europe are already moving forward here because they don't have this restriction... the UK loses out.

Cory Doctorow writes:

This isn't capitalism, nor is it socialism. It's a kind of corporatism in which the risk―the money spent speculatively mapping Britain, arguing in Parliament, drawing up postal code boundaries―is entirely assumed by the public, but the reward―access and profit-taking―are entirely given to the private sector.

Same goes for the Ordnance Survey. Luckily, they’re in the process of being taken apart online by OpenStreetMap. Having said that, their paper maps are wonderful.

it is not true that the "reward [is] entirely given to the private sector." the royal mail is owned by the government, so the profits extracted from selling the postcode database could be viewed as subsidising other services. (post in rural areas, for example)

I'm fairly convinced the most badass part of that is that he can just do ".distinace.m" and get it in meters. Of course there are other units if you prefer: http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/co... :)

The distance/area objects in GeoDjango are an under-appreciated feature. The docs have a more readable version of the supported units:

http://geodjango.org/docs/measure.html#supported-units

Rails' ActiveSupport has a similarly nifty feature, where 15.days.ago is a valid Time object, and it all just works out of the box.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com