mapgubbins

Subsequent to my post in March, a few additional details have emerged on Royal Mail’s Positional Data Capture project. The objective of this project is to collect location information for all Royal Mail delivery address points in the UK. 

Last week a Communication Workers Union (CWU) representative posted a Deployment Guidelines document on the RoyalMailChat online message board. (Free registration required to view the full message.)

Following is an edited extract of key points:

Branches may be aware of the previous trial regarding the Positional Data Capture (PDC) initiative which took place in London, Cardiff and Lampeter last year. PDC is part of the new products and services strategy and will seek to establish Royal Mail as a major player in the positional data market; currently worth £100m a year and growing. This information is commercially attractive to Royal Mail who intends to sell the data captured to a host of organisations and companies who have shown an interest in obtaining this information.

Royal Mail, as the Universal service Provider for the UK, has a significant advantage over any other delivery or logistics company in that it has access to 28.2 million address points and has data systems such as A plus which capture every post coded delivery point in the UK. This information will be used to overlay positional data information, such as the address point and the delivery access point using satellite technology GPRS.

National Objectives 

• To capture all address points and access points circa 28.2m
• To achieve data accuracy of c95% accurate to within <5m
• To achieve 60% positive experience from the volunteers involved in PDC covering training and use of the technology.
• To provide a commercially viable product and enhance Royal Mail’s portfolio of products and services

Locations

All Royal Mail Delivery Office locations will be covered.

Duration

The deployment will be divided into 2 phases, timeline highlighted below. 

Anglia = 02/07/12 – 24/09/12

Thames Valley, South East, South West, London, Wales, Midlands, North West England, North East England, Scotland and Northern Ireland = 03/09/12 – 30/06/13

The programme outlined above is still provisional and is subject to change.

In addition to the above information, Nigel Pindar (Solutions Architect on the PDC project from May 2011 to March 2012) has posted the following note to his LinkedIn profile. (I’ve added the vendor links.)

Positional Data Capture (PDC) is a new Royal Mail product-offering, providing hitherto unachievable levels of GPS data accuracy for the UK’s 28.8 million addresses. It uses GPRS or WiFi to upload data from mobile devices to a PHP/Java, Windows, Apache & MySQL based Web Portal hosted on a PaaS infrastructure provided by BT.

This is a £10m project which will enable RMG to move into a completely new market, providing GPS data to a variety of new customers.

I authored both the Logical Design and Physical Design documentation, successfully taking them through RMG’s gated project management process and achieving sign-off on them.

I am RMG’s solutions/technical lead liaising with vendors; Trimble (the application vendor), BT, CSC, AFD and Accenture; ensuring that the solution components they’re supplying will integrate successfully with each other.

I’m assuming the above description applies only to the technology and vendors involved in the project to capture the data, and not to any proposed customer solution. It remains unclear what services or products Royal Mail plans to offer to the location intelligence market once it has successfully captured and cleansed the data.

It will be interesting to see whether Royal Mail decides to focus simply on production of address data sets for use in third-party software, i.e. in direct competition with the National Address Gazetteer (NAG) and Ordnance Survey’s AddressBase products, or whether it also intends to offer the data as part of its own software/service proposition.

I’m very skeptical that this project will produce a national geo-referenced address data set with higher positional accuracy than the existing NAG and AddressBase products. Any large data set produced from a mass labour effort is likely to be of variable quality. However it’s certainly plausible that the Royal Mail data will be competitive in much of the market for this type of information.

A particular selling point for Royal Mail will be the inclusion of address location data for Northern Ireland, since the existing available products only cover Great Britain. On the other hand Royal Mail is only collecting location data for postal delivery points, and missing out the 1.5 million or so “objects without postal addresses” included in the Plus and Premium versions of AddressBase. My current best guess is that Royal Mail will present its positional data as an added-value alternative for existing PAF customers and as a lower-price alternative for commercial licensees of the basic version of AddressBase.

Today the Environment Agency published a report summarising the results of an inventory of closed and abandoned mining waste facilities that are causing serious environmental impacts or have the potential to cause such an impact, in England and Wales. 

I’ve made this map of the 148 sites in the inventory, based on data in a table in the report:

http://www.owenboswarva.com/mwd/

The inventory is a requirement under Article 20 of the European Commission Mining Waste Directive (MWD), which states that: “Member States shall ensure that an inventory of closed waste facilities, including abandoned waste facilities, located on their territory which cause serious negative environmental impacts or have the potential of becoming in the medium or short term a serious threat to human health or the environment is drawn up and periodically updated.”

There are estimated to be nearly 100,000 closed or abandoned mines in England and Wales. This inventory highlights only those that present the most serious negative environmental impact based on the risk criteria applied by the Environment Agency. The EA report notes that existing data is incomplete and that “the inventory will be updated periodically and as new information is obtained”.

Almost all of the 148 sites are included in the inventory due to a potential for water pollution. However two (Spen Lane near Gateshead and Cortonwood Colliery near Rotherham) present a fire hazard, one (Ring Lows Quarry Tips north of Rochdale) presents an instability hazard, and one (Wheal Maid near Truro in Cornwall) presents a hazard to human health.

I’ve made a basic tool to display and browse the Land Registry’s Price Paid information for February 2012 on a map, and put it on my website here:

http://www.owenboswarva.com/ppi/

As mentioned in previous posts, Land Registry maintains a dataset of more than 17 million residential property transfers in England and Wales going back to 1995. From last week Land Registry is releasing monthly updates to that dataset as ‘open data’ under the Open Government Licence.

The first open data available is a csv file containing 56,043 rows of data recorded in the month of February 2012. 93% of the rows of data are new transaction records, i.e. additions to the main Price Paid dataset. The remainder are either changes to existing records or records that Land Registry considers should be deleted from the main dataset.

However only 37% of the additional rows of data apply to property transactions that were effective in February 2012. The other 63% of rows covers property transactions from previous months — mainly January 2012 (44%) and December 2011 (13%).

This rather underlines the difficulty of treating the monthly updates as a discrete dataset. Due to the time lag in reporting of transactions it will be some months before we have a reasonably complete set of transaction data for February 2012.

The map image above shows the geographic distribution of the 19,210 transaction records so far available for February 2012. I have geo-referenced these records to postcode level, relying mainly on the Ordnance Survey’s Code-Point Open dataset. The tool enables users to search transaction records from a map interface and look at the details of individual transactions.

The Land Registry has today published its latest Price Paid information on residential property sales in England and Wales. For the first time this data has been released under the Open Government Licence, as ‘open data’. This means it can be re-used by the public and third-party developers both for personal and commercial purposes.

Unfortunately this open data release contains only a month’s worth of additions and amendments to the Price Paid information dataset. (The release contains data for February 2012, rather than January 2012 as previously expected.) The main dataset, which contains more than 17 million records of house transfers going back to 1995, remains closed and available only on commercial terms.

Details of charging policy removed

The licence cost for the whole dataset is more than £50,000, which makes it affordable only for big businesses. The Price Paid information is gathered by Land Registry under statutory authority as part of its public task.

Until today the licensing costs for chargeable Price Paid information were published on the Land Registry’s website at the link above as follows:

Subscription – We license the data for an annual subscription plus a charge for each address bought.

- Annual subscription is £2,200 plus VAT

- £0.008775 plus VAT per address update supplied, for each product that incorporates the data (with a minimum payment of £100).

Ad hoc purchases – For customers who want to make ad hoc purchases we charge for the data you want to reuse on the basis of £0.0117 per address you take.

This morning those details were removed from the website. It’s possible that means the charging policy is under review. More likely Land Registry knows its charging policy is unreasonable and doesn’t want too much scrutiny. So much for transparency.

Descoping

When the open data release of Price Paid information was originally announced in the Autumn Statement, it initially appeared that the Cabinet Office had decided to release the whole dataset.

This seemed to make a lot of sense. The Land Registry’s Price Paid information is arguably one of the nation’s core reference datasets. Open data release of the Price Paid dataset would produce measurable economic benefits by reducing the input costs for existing licensees in the property and conveyancing sectors and, more importantly, by removing a barrier to entry for innovative small and medium sized businesses that cannot currently afford to access the data in bulk.

By comparison, open data release of only the newest Price Paid information is unlikely to generate significant economic benefits. The main effect will be to make the addresses of new homeowners readily available to direct marketers.

Earlier this month I wrote a longer blog post on this subject.

This week Guardian Professional interviewed Nigel Shadbolt on the importance of including local government in the open data revolution. Below are some comments that I added:

Opening up public data held by councils is important, of course, particularly as more and more responsibilities are being devolved to the local level. We are already seeing some examples of good practice by individual councils acting on their own initiative. However if we want to implement the open data agenda consistently across local government that would be easier with central coordination and standards of practice.

I’m not convinced the disparity between local government and central government is any greater than the disparity between individual departments within central government. While the Cabinet Office and Department for Transport have pushed ahead with open data policy, the stance taken by BIS and the Ministry of Justice has frankly been obstructionist.

Local authorities are currently working to a code of recommended practice from the Department for Communities and Government, which puts the emphasis almost entirely on publication of spending and performance data.

With Tory MPs talking about encouraging residents to become an “army of armchair auditors”, it is understandable if some councillors see the Government’s transparency agenda as a politically motivated burden rather than as an opportunity to better inform local citizens.

More progress in central government would improve the potential for open local data. Almost all of the core reference datasets (address data, mapping, environmental data, etc.) are controlled by central government bodies, and these should be our first priority. It will be much easier for councils to open their data once there is a freely accessible national data infrastructure in place.