Dear all,
Thank you for taking the time to subscribe to this mailing list,
and I'm sorry it's taken me so long to write this first email. This
probably indicates why I'm looking for help, though :)
First, a bit of background. I am one of the founders of the npemap.org.uk
web site which provides postcode collection facilities as well as display
of out of copyright Ordnance Survey maps (but I'm assuming that most
people on this list will have seen that site already), and I've also
been looking after freethepostcode.org for the last three or so years,
after Steve Coast indicated that he was no longer interested in keeping
it going. I thought (and still think) that it was a good idea, and it
seemed a shame to throw away the existing infrastructure as well as
risk the postcode database becoming stale.
Since then, both sites have continued to collect postcodes, but
(certainly on the FTP.org side) I've had to turn down many good
suggestions due to a lack of time to implement changes, as well as my
own relative unfamiliarity of Ruby (and lack of desire to rewrite it)
and lack of clarity of how to grow the project.
Many of the suggestions and offers I've had relate to data validation
and quality checking, and lots of people have been very helpful in
providing lists of dubious postcodes to remove from the database, and
so on. However I've been very slow to act on those requests too.
A long time ago, even before I took over freethepostcode.org, I
saw that freethepostcode.org, npemap.org.uk and (later) the dracos.co.uk
postcode locator could use a single collection point for users who just
wanted to get hold of high quality, freely available postcode data.
On a whim, I registered freepostcodes.org.uk for this purpose.
What I wanted (want) to do (even in the light of the open data
initiatives from the UK Government) is provide a common methodology
for data collection, processing (validation, quality control and collation),
the publication of high quality postcodes data with several data sets
with varying degrees of accuracy and coverage, data curation (being
able to track where a given data point came from over time) and also
provide useful APIs for people to query, submit, quality control,
in realtime. Essentially this would mean improving a lot of the existing
work that's already been done on npemap.org.uk and freethepostcodes.org,
and making it as generic as possible.
What's clear to me is that in order to realise my vision, I need to
allow many people to contribute, in the same way that OSM works.
(by the way, I would be interested if people say "but OSM already does
everything you need" - I haven't paid all that much attention to OSM
recently, but I believe that the global mapping goals and the UK postcode
collection goals are fairly separate, although obviously OSM can benefit
from the postcodes). There are many areas from expertise in current
methodologies in postcode data processing, to web/application design
and more that I need help in.
I have at my disposal a Linux web/database hosting platform (I'm primarily
a sysadmin by trade), a subversion server, mailing lists, trac, etc etc
and I'm willing to be a kind of project coordinator and hosting agent
for what could be a highly collaborative project, but I would really love
to not be a bottleneck (which is the current situation) so having a number
of people on board who can contribute would be wonderful.
Maybe there is a better way than all of that old-fashioned infrastructure
out there in "the cloud", which could allow even easier collaboration.
I'm open to all ideas.
At the end of the day I want to play a small part in creating useful
data for people, and (bearing in mind how many thousands of people have
contributed to the sites so far) ensure that the results are made
available in the most useful forms possible, for as long as we can
imagine (and if one data the raw postcode files straight from the
Royal Mail become completely Free, I'd be delighted and we could all
go to the pub instead!)
So, is this ringing any bells? Does this make people immediately want
to sit down and start coding, or suggest the latest and greatest way
of running a project like this? I'm hoping that at least some discussion
will emerge from this email.
All the best,
Dominic.
--
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)
