Posted by David Sheldon on Wed, 22 Nov 2006 10:01:00 +0000
Sorry for that lack of updates here. We do have jobs and lives outside this site I'm afraid.
Last time we thought we were doing well at just over 1000 postcodes. Now we have 10000!
This is thanks to publicity from The Guardian and BoingBoing among others.
Progress towards collecting a complete set of outward parts is very good. 77% is actually most of the postcodes in England and Wales. It turns out that the list that we generated the list of missing postcodes from was not very accurate — we are probably very nearly there.
I guess our next goal will be the complete set of outward and the number from the inward part, which we seem to be nearly half way towards. This will allow us to achieve accuracy across the whole country of a mile or so for pinpointing any location.
Thank you to everyone that has helped create our data, and do email us if you are using our data so we can share your story on the website (though no guarantees).
Coming soon: An API that allows you to query the location of a postcode using our database.
Latest news on Scotland and Northern Ireland: We have some maps but nothing scanned. The Popular Edition maps are going to be hard to orthorectify as they don't have any national grid lines on them. The War office editions have the gridlines over-printed, but not parallel with the edges of the maps, and the 7th edition maps are not going out of copyright for another 3-5 years. We still have no maps of Northern Ireland apart from our really low-res ones.