Mapping Hacks

This week, Michael Cross of the Guardian and Free Our Data has been in high dudgeon about the messed up situation for street addressing and postal code data in the UK. Licensing costs are set to double next year, for the use of the data needed to do postcode geocoding from the Royal Mail. Applications for new postcodes have to be made by local government authorities, and so are tied into their planning systems, but not, say to their taxation systems.

My mother recently moved into a new development, and though she’s been allocated a postcode, the utility companies don’t recognise it yet, nor did the tax department of the local council when she spent some time actually attempting to pay her council tax voluntarily. All the data should be there at source; but the centralised system of submitting updates incurs delays in data propagation.

Well, the National Spatial Address Infrastructure was intended to change a lot of this; streamline processes and protocols for the interchange of addressing data between local government agencies. The project was quietly dropped after Ordnance Survey refused to collaborate or back down over its copyright assertions, and has gone completely into the hands of the commercial partners in the venture, “Intelligent Addressing” as the National Land and Property Gazetteer. It uses a standard called BS 7666 for addressing data. But NLPG itself depends to some extent on Ordnance Survey’s AddressPoint, which in turn is redistributing amd being used to georeference the Royal Mail’s PAF data.

Mikel was recently wondering about the role of local authorities in syndicating updates of planning information, especially for new developments. The Local Government Association looks like a federation of local authorities and IDeA, a private company which it wholly owns and which lives in the .gov namespace, is responsible for maintaining the contract with Intelligent Addressing for the NLPG. Recall that Intelligent Addressing had a complaint against the OS upheld by the Office of Public Sector Information back in July; it judged that the OS had behaved anticompetitively, against the code of information practise that is intended to govern it, and its licensing policy was obfuscatory, and encouraged it to try harder in future in a kind of mild, diffident admonishment. (Michael Cross points out that the NLPG only covers 320 of 366 local authorities right now (and I wonder who the missing pieces are and why they’re missing)).

In the case of the addressing mess, everyone’s data is hooked into everyone else’s, all interdependent. It can’t be unentwingled, which is why the attempt to enforce payment for use of data on proprietary terms is bound to escalate in a tit-for-tat fashion: “if we’re contributing 20% of the data, we should be extracting 20% of the future value of it from you”. Now OS is launching a competing product to the NLPG despite the OPSI’s reservations, after having walked away from the unified infrastructure discussions. Development of the NLPG is being paid for with taxpayers’ money anyway, because the OS will not co-operate for proprietary data licensing reasons. Local authorities are losing money by giving data away to the OS anyway; why not share it direct with each other and with the public?

Meanwhile la lutte continue, and at the rate the Royal Mail, OS and IDeA are going, the postcodes will be freed before the stalemate and subsequent legal fallout subsides. I wonder how interested some local authorities would be in the opportunity to georeference against and build on a free of copyright spatial/address data set at this point?

Posted in geodata, planning, annoying_gits |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.