Guardian Unlimited Technology: Living on the street with no name

[Tracey P. Lauriault-2]

tracey spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited Technology site and thought you should see it.

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Note from tracey:

This is a hilarious article about a sad & ridiculous data reality! Bit different in Canada but no really!
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To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited Technology site, go to http://technology.guardian.co.uk

Living on the street with no name
The eagerness of public bodies to cash in on their data has created a black hole in satnav systems
Charles Arthur
Thursday April 20 2006
The Guardian


Emlyn Williams is mystified: why doesn't his house show up on satellite navigation systems? It was built in 1988, and he moved there in 1996, yet from time to time delivery drivers complain that they can't find it. His own tests on demo models in shops show that the problem is real: "Sometimes the postcode is recognised (not always), but is linked to a different street. On the ones I've tried, the street name isn't recognised at all."

When he searches online on Multimap, he gets a circle over the correct place - but no street name appears. Multimap told him that "our map data comes from different suppliers who provide many other organisations with this same information". Other navigators, such as ViaMichelin and RAC Route Planner, recognise either or both the address and the postcode, but show no street name. Online, Streetmap.co.uk recognises the street name and postcode.

So what is going on? The insistence that address and postcode data should "pay" for themselves is creating delays for the very people and companies who originally funded their collection.

The Williams house's apparent invisibility is caused by the eagerness of the Post Office and Ordnance Survey (OS) to sell their postcode and geographic address data sets respectively. That wouldn't happen if both provided their data free, as the Guardian Technology Free Our Data campaign argues they should.

When a building is created, the local council assigns it an address and a number or name. That name and address is passed on to the Post Office, which assigns a postcode. The UK postcode list, known as the Postcode Address File (PAF), has been resold by the Post Office for years, even though more widespread use would ease the Post Office's task: postcoded letters are easier to sort and deliver.

The PAF and its updates are bought by OS, which literally puts them on the map. "The value we bring is the high-quality spatial coordinate, ie saying where '23 Main Street' is in terms of x and y coordinates," says an OS spokesman.

So why doesn't the Williams house appear on satellite navigation systems? As OS itself says on its website (http://tinyurl.com/jceto): "Please note that not all navigation systems use road network data produced or maintained by Ordnance Survey." Which can easily create confusion. As it points out: "There are 800,000 road names, the most frequently occurring being High Street - there are more than 1,000 of them."

But why don't all in-car navigation systems use the data collected by the UK's mapping agency? Because it's expensive. To bring down costs, some satellite navigation companies have tried sourcing data from local councils which, after all, know about road changes. They're the ones who maintain roads, and tell the Post Office about new ones - which tells OS, which maps them.

But OS's licensing foils that. As the minutes of a Coventry council meeting from March reveal (http://tinyurl.com/z6n2h), councils are not allowed to pass on that data to satnav companies, because the council uses OS maps to note where changes have been made. "The provisions of the legal agreement, covering our use of maps and derived data, preclude passing data to any organisation for commercial purposes. Therefore, the city council could not provide data to the satellite navigation companies due to legal constraints," say the council minutes.

So the Williams house remains elusive. "If double-glazing salesman relied on satnav to find me I might be tempted to keep quiet, but they don't. Meanwhile, I have to guide delivery people into my address by phone," he remarks - another example of how putting a price on public data imposes a cost on the public.

See the campaign blog at www.freeourdata.org.uk

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