A few days ago the Royal Mail published some information on their new Pinpoint positional accuracy programme
“Location-based information is used by the emergency services, satellite navigation systems and smartphone applications. We want to help improve the accuracy of this information. So, we are mapping address information which is accurate to the front door of every home and business in your area. This could, for example, help the satellite navigation systems in the cars of friends and families find your address more easily.”
The pilot in East Anglia involves postal delivery staff capturing coordinates of front doors using GPS receivers. It is difficult to imagine a more pointless duplication of effort than this and to what end?
Only a year ago it appeared that government had resolved the address wars by creating GeoPlace, now it appears that Royal Mail have decided to set up in competition with them and revive the address wars. Why one partially tax payer funded service arm should seek to exploit it’s unique position to compete with another government trading fund is beyond me, it’s bonkers. I hope Royal Mail gets a bloody nose out of this and is forced to make PAF freely available as OpenData.
One thought on “And you thought the Address Wars were over?”
I’m not entirely sure of the need for a ‘co-ords of the door’ data set over and above AddressBase. Does this really need capturing? Did it have a reasonable business case? Maybe if you’re looking at delivering multiple packages to people who have incredible long driveways? Either way, having a different government organisation capturing this is expensive and needless.