[-SPAM-] Re: application idea

[David Pottage]

On Wed, September 19, 2007 12:00 pm, Ian Stirling wrote:
> ian douglas wrote:
>> Tilman Baumann wrote:
>>
>>> The biggest challenge would be a mapping from gps coordinates to
>>> regions/postcodes or such.
>>> If you have this information, you could do all sorts of crazy stuff.
>>> But i doubt these data would be very easy to get.
>>
>>
>> I've seen it at another contract I worked a year ago, but not sure if
>> the GPS-to-US-zip-code data was freely available or a paid service. The
>> database I used for my job there had the entire US postal code regions
>> mapped out based on latitude/longitude so the data IS out there. Just a
>> matter of seeing if it's free to download from somewhere. The database
>> was gigantic though, I'm not sure it's something you'd want to store on
>> the device itself.
>
> Going to the 5 digit zips is easy - it's well under a meg.
> 5 digit + 4 is a whole different matter.

But is the data freely available, or is it constrained by copyright or the
like.

In the UK, postcode (zipcode) data is restricted by copyright, and the
post office makes money selling licenses to users. Even if we could get
the data, we could not freely distribute it.

In the UK there is a project [1] to build a post code database using user
contributed information. Basicaly users are asked to type in the postocode
and location of their homes, busneses, and any other site they can find.
We many have to use similar database for other countries.

[1] http://www.freethepostcode.org/

-- 
David Pottage

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