OFT waves through UK.gov's national addressing database

The government's national addressing database venture with the Ordnance Survey was cleared by the Office of Fair Trading today. GeoPlace was created last December as a joint undertaking between local government and the OS agency to amalgamate addresses into a single register for use by public sector workers and private …

[WonkoTheSane]

Mailing Preference Service?

Gov't should filter any database sold to private sector via this, because NO-ONE wants junk mail!

[Code Monkey]

Great

Now where do I opt out?

[Steve Lonie]

Scotland????

GeoPlace™ – a government initiative for national addressing, Competition officials have cleared government plans to create a definitive national address database for England and Wales.

Hardly national then..

[geographer]

Scotland

Scotlabnd and Northern Ireland have already greated the same data sets CAG ( centraal Adddress Gazetteer) NI Pointer. Combining local authority and Post office data.

[ShaggyDoggy]

Oh no

Not another fucking database.

How long before this info

- gets left on a train

- gets sold to a company

- turns up on wikileaks

What could possibly go wrong

Oh yes, and who's going to maintain all those address changes ?

[Luther Blissett]

Moving houses

You mistake the synecdoche for reality. I didn't read anything about the occupants of those addresses.

That said, can it be long before someone decides it worthwhile to "add value" by joining just such datasets with it?

[Martin 19]

OMFG!

Then someone would be able to determine the geographic co-ordinates of your street address! They could do this on their local machine, in addition to being able to do this on Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc etc etc etc etc!

[BongoJoe]

Bing Maps?

"Then someone would be able to determine the geographic co-ordinates of your street address! They could do this on their local machine, in addition to being able to do this on Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc etc etc etc etc!"

Well, one can't do anything with Bing Maps.

If one puts in my address into Google from any machine anywhere in the world the flag shows above where I live.

Shove it into Bing and the map shows my address as always being about 30 miles West of where the browser's machine is.

Not too clever really, is Bing.

[geographer]

re Oh No

this is in fact not an additional database but identifies the merging of local authority data with postal data to create a master national data set rather than have two competing "products"

[Gerrit Hoekstra]

This data has always available to the public, but at a price.

This data has always been available and well maintained, but for a very steep price and onorous licencing restrictions. And it is geo-data, not address data we are talking about here. You can get all the address data from Royal Mail, also at a not inconsiderable price.

And here is why this is a good thing for your frontline services: Every UK police force has a number of these expensive licences sloshing around for use in their command and control systems, in case ShaggyDoggy has to call 999 and explain his whereabouts after he woke up in a field somewhere with his trousers missing. The police then use this data to work out how to reach said fuckwit, and should they be that way inclined, use this data to retrieve the missing trousers from the local den of iniquity. And then see to it that his mother hears about this.

[Anonymous Coward]

NLPG (National Land and Property Gazetteer)

This is not a new database, it been around for a decade now.

The NLPG is created and maintained primarily by updates from LLPG (Local LPG) maintained by councils.

The LLPG in turn tends to be updated when somebody puts a planning app in, or street naming and number issue new house numbers.

The council should have gone about and loaded in to their LLPG all the Land and Property on their patch. An extremely expensive and time consuming job, requiring great attention to detail and adherence to the BS7666 standard.

CAN YOU GUESS WHERE THE PROBLEM IS?

Yes, the LLPG mainly hold reasonable quality data on new or renovated building, and crap on all other properties and land holdings, as the councils had neither the time, money or staff to do a proper job.

Any comercial organisation getting involved in using NLPG data really needs to understand it's limitations.

Your better off sticking to the old fashioned address point.

[rsm1979]

PAF

Will this replace or compete with the Royal Mail's Postcode Address File?