UK Geocoding
Posted at 9:46pm on Friday, January 5th, 2007 by AndyWe‘ve been thinking about a couple of web apps for a while that need UK geocoding, but Sleevenotez and Forkd (and some others that we *still* can’t talk about!) have kept us rather busy.
Over Christmas I got the time to start thinking about the next applications and the first thing I started researching was the excellent Google maps API, with a plan to some very basic geocoding. It took me a while to realise that the reason my test code wasn’t working wasn’t that it was bust, but that Google don’t allow UK address geocoding.
Further investigation showed that there’s a very simple reason – the UK is one of the few countries where the geocoding data is not in the public domain (despite being generated with public funds).
There’s a good piece on the current state of play, and the new alternatives, over at The Guardian. Both alternatives (npemap.org.uk and freethepostcode.org) are a way from being a viable alternative to the PAF file, but they’re definitely worth watching.
Luckily one of the two applications we’re thinking of is equally well served by the excellent Geo-Names web services. Quite what we’re going to do about the other one though, I don’t know…
