Collecting free postcode data

Fri Nov 3 13:07:00 2006

Could you spare two minutes to locate your house/workplace on a online map, and type in your postcode?

The downside is that you have to find your house on old maps. The upside is that you get to look at old maps.

Why? To help build a free-to-use database that links Postcode to Latitude/Longitude - something desperately needed in the UK.

Over the last month I've been working on a website to collect the locations of postcodes. Update: It is here

The idea is to use out-of-copyright OS maps, and to get people to locate their home on the map, and specify the postcode. Get enough people to do it (perhaps for their workplace too), and you will have a not-perfect-but-good-enough-for-most-purposes database that anybody will be free to use.

We have even had an article in the Gurdian and a mention by Ed Parsons at the Ordinance Survey.