On 1 April 2010, Ordnance Survey opened up a lot of it's data including a cut-down version of Code-Point - a database of UK postcodes.
Since this data is available free of charge, and has a licence aligned to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence; I decided to download the data and incorporate it into an SQL table for use on this website.
I've now completed the import of the data (1,696,088 records not including code definitions) and have created a webpage which can be used to query this information. A user can input a postcode and have all open data which I have available displayed.
Not only that, but I have also been learning about converting geographical data in to different systems. The Code-Point data provides co-ordinates in the British Coordinate System of six-figure eastings and northings. My new page converts this data into latitude/longitude, National Grid Reference, Worked All Britain (WAB) square and Maidenhead Grid Locator. By having latitude/longitude data, a Google Map can also display a marker showing where a postcode is.
Now I've got a bit of a grasp on how to convert data, I hope to extend the page to accept input of other forms of geographic data and have it convert in the same way. For now though, I'll leave it at postcode only.
There's nothing particularly unique about this. Many sites across the internet allow postcode searches and data conversion. This was essentially a two day project which I decided to do simply because it costs nothing but server space (over 150MiB), I fancied doing some coding and I find this information useful from time-to-time as part of my amateur radio hobby. If anyone else finds this information useful then that is a bonus.
Find the link in the navigation menu, above.
Since this data is available free of charge, and has a licence aligned to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence; I decided to download the data and incorporate it into an SQL table for use on this website.
I've now completed the import of the data (1,696,088 records not including code definitions) and have created a webpage which can be used to query this information. A user can input a postcode and have all open data which I have available displayed.
Not only that, but I have also been learning about converting geographical data in to different systems. The Code-Point data provides co-ordinates in the British Coordinate System of six-figure eastings and northings. My new page converts this data into latitude/longitude, National Grid Reference, Worked All Britain (WAB) square and Maidenhead Grid Locator. By having latitude/longitude data, a Google Map can also display a marker showing where a postcode is.
Now I've got a bit of a grasp on how to convert data, I hope to extend the page to accept input of other forms of geographic data and have it convert in the same way. For now though, I'll leave it at postcode only.
There's nothing particularly unique about this. Many sites across the internet allow postcode searches and data conversion. This was essentially a two day project which I decided to do simply because it costs nothing but server space (over 150MiB), I fancied doing some coding and I find this information useful from time-to-time as part of my amateur radio hobby. If anyone else finds this information useful then that is a bonus.
Find the link in the navigation menu, above.