National Postcodes to be introduced

ukoda

Impetus wrote: »

It does because half the addresses realities in Ireland are missing from the GPS virtual world. eg Garmin, Mercedes Benz, VW. You can't find the destination in many cases. The road doesn't exist in Garminland etc. Hence the need for more memory and data for Irish addresses than are present at the moment.

And why shoud everybody have to buy one or more GPS devices to navigate your view of Ireland? Or to deliver goods etc. And why create another account ID to point to everybody, whether they like it or not, for fraudsters to organize stolen data into neat tables?

The dumber the country, the longer the postcode.

UK has 29 million addresses in its database (just to correct my earlier figure.

Do you think if we fix every address in Ireland and add all the new ones that we will come anywhere near 29 million unique addresses.

You've completely dodged my question. Do you really think Irelands 2.2 million size database won't fit on a sat nav when 29 million from the UK plus the entire addresses of Europe can?

You've also ignored me when I pointed out how eircode can prevent a huge amount of fraud.

SpaceTime

I still think the whole notion of random postcodes is an absolute joke though.

Ireland's going to be the first country on the planet with non geographic postcodes lol.

You couldn't make it up!

We've a golden opportunity to create a really useful piece of infrastructure yet we are doggedly pursuing a system that's solving an entirely different problem : address verification.

We need to be able to find locations. All this does is create yet another database with look up codes.

You might as well just let people link their email address or mobile number to a geographic location and look that up! That's all Eircode seems to be - just a database key.

oscarBravo

SpaceTime wrote: »

We need to be able to find locations. All this does is create yet another database with look up codes.

I've been following this discussion with some interest. I run a business that is utterly dependent on being able to accurately locate current and potential customers. A database with lookup codes - as long as I get to look up a latitude and longitude - is perfectly adequate for my needs. I'm not entirely clear on why so many people seem convinced that eircodes won't work.

You might as well just let people link their email address or mobile number to a geographic location and look that up! That's all Eircode seems to be - just a database key.

Yes, it's a database key - but it's one that all my current and potential customers will be advised of, and which will tell me where they are.

What's the problem?

plodder

ukoda wrote: »

UK has 29 million addresses in its database (just to correct my earlier figure.

Do you think if we fix every address in Ireland and add all the new ones that we will come anywhere near 29 million unique addresses.

You've completely dodged my question. Do you really think Irelands 2.2 million size database won't fit on a sat nav when 29 million from the UK plus the entire addresses of Europe can?

You've also ignored me when I pointed out how eircode can prevent a huge amount of fraud.

There arent 29 million addresses on UK satnavs. That would make no sense. There are only 1.8 million postcodes in the UK and that is what is stored on each satnav, because any address is known to be very close to the relevant postcode location.

Because of the random nature of Eircode, that won;t be possible which is why the location of each address needs to be stored separately on Irish satnavs. So, a country that is one tenth the size of the UK (by population) requires a larger satnav database (2.2 million entries)

ukoda

plodder wrote: »

There arent 29 million addresses on UK satnavs. That would make no sense. There are only 1.8 million postcodes in the UK and that is what is stored on each satnav, because any address is known to be very close to the relevant postcode location.

Because of the random nature of Eircode, that won;t be possible which is why the location of each address needs to be stored separately on Irish satnavs. So, a country that is one tenth the size of the UK (by population) requires a larger satnav database (2.2 million entries)

That's complete nonsense. A sat nav has the ability to query 29 million addresses for the uk. There ARE 29 million addresses in the UK. Look it up.

plodder

ukoda wrote: »

That's complete nonsense. A sat nav has the ability to query 29 million addresses for the uk. There ARE 29 million addresses in the UK. Look it up.

You're wrong I'm afraid. You can look up the 29 million addresses in Uk, but they aren't all stored on a satnav, because the postcode is hierarchical and all addresses with the same postcode are stored as one record in the datbase on a satnav.

Why would you store 18 Main Street, Slough, and 19 Main Street Slough as two separate records when they have the same postcode and are obviously next to each other. With Eircode, two neighbouring addresses will have completley different postcodes.

It's clear you either don't understand the issues here, or are deliberately obfuscating the issue.

oscarBravo

plodder wrote: »

You're wrong I'm afraid. You can look up the 29 million addresses in Uk, but they aren't all stored on a satnav, because the postcode is hierarchical and all addresses with the same postcode are stored as one record in the datbase on a satnav.

Just so I'm clear: you're telling me that there is no satnav that can locate a specific street address in the UK, but can only navigate to a postcode, and finding the street address is left as an exercise for the driver?

Have you ever actually used a satnav in the UK?

ukoda

plodder wrote: »

You're wrong I'm afraid. You can look up the 29 million addresses in Uk, but they aren't all stored on a satnav, because the postcode is hierarchical and all addresses with the same postcode are stored as one record in the datbase on a satnav.

Why would you store 18 Main Street, Slough, and 19 Main Street Slough as two separate records when they have the same postcode and are obviously next to each other. With Eircode, two neighbouring addresses will have completley different postcodes.

It's clear you either don't understand the issues here, or are deliberately obfuscating the issue.

The extact same thing can be done with eircode. You store Street name / townland / area once and assign the eircodes to combination. The exact same way it can be done in other countries. There's one unique combination that an eircode pulls together as oppose to multiple combinations the UK postcode pulls together. The fact that their are only 2.2 million unique combinations in Ireland v's 29 million unique combinations in the UK means it can and WILL fit on a sat nav.

It's clear you don't understand anything about this.

plodder

oscarBravo wrote: »

Just so I'm clear: you're telling me that there is no satnav that can locate a specific street address in the UK, but can only navigate to a postcode, and finding the street address is left as an exercise for the driver?

No. I'm saying that a Uk satnav doesn't have to store each individual address separately.

Have you ever actually used a satnav in the UK?

Yes

oscarBravo

plodder wrote: »

No. I'm saying that a Uk satnav doesn't have to store each individual address separately.

OK - so how does a UK satnav translate a street address into a latitude and longitude for navigation purposes?

clewbays

plodder wrote: »

satnav doesn't have to store each individual address separately.

It would be much more useful if it did so the fire brigade or ambulance or taxi doesn't have to rely on someone in the house waving their arms to attract their attention. Houses number 18 and 19 may be adjacent to each other but how about Craven Cottage and Moorington Lodge?

According to the Eircom documentation the address will be held in a very structured format so it would be easy to group all the Eircodes together on a street by street basis to simulate the 1950s style postcodes.

ukoda

clewbays wrote: »

It would be much more useful if it did so the fire brigade or ambulance or taxi doesn't have to rely on someone in the house waving their arms to attract their attention. Houses number 18 and 19 may be adjacent to each other but how about Craven Cottage and Moorington Lodge?

According to the Eircom documentation the address will be held in a very structured format so it would be easy to group all the Eircodes together on a street by street basis to simulate the 1950s style postcodes.

The national ambulance service announced they will use eircode. So the person can just give thier eircode and the ambulance will know where they are.

(of course people will argue that's no good for an accident on the road. In this scenario they want you to download an app, generate a code, remember the code and then call the ambulance. They think this is a solution. It is not. The solution here is technology to triangulate and pin point the caller from the ambulance control centre using cell tower, gps chip on phone and any wifi networks near by. This solution is being worked on btw)

plodder

oscarBravo wrote: »

OK - so how does a UK satnav translate a street address into a latitude and longitude for navigation purposes?

My guess would be that they work it out relative to the postcode location and the road geometry that they have already in their mapping. <edit/> FWIW the Postcode address file which would be the equivalent product to the products Eircode is licensing, doesn't have latitude and longitude co-ordinates for individual buildings.

plodder

ukoda wrote: »

The extact same thing can be done with eircode. You store Street name / townland / area once and assign the eircodes to combination. The exact same way it can be done in other countries. There's one unique combination that an eircode pulls together as oppose to multiple combinations the UK postcode pulls together. The fact that their are only 2.2 million unique combinations in Ireland v's 29 million unique combinations in the UK means it can and WILL fit on a sat nav.

Sorry, this makes no sense to me whatsoever.

ukoda

plodder wrote: »

Sorry, this makes no sense to me whatsoever.

I don't think I can explain it any simpler.

UK address data = large
Irish address data = small

If large data can fit easily on a sat nav, this means small can also fit easily.

The amount of raw data needed on a sat nav to allow you navigate to 29 million unique addreses in the UK is less than the amount of raw data needed to navigate to 2.2 million unique addresses in Ireland. Therefore it can fit on a sat nav.

That's as basic as it gets.

yuloni

This post has been deleted.

murpho999

yuloni wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

I don't see coverage as good when it's particularly one-sided and no counter viewpoints offered.

As usual, Irish media looks to UK for systems as if they are perfect.

Why would a postcode be required to easily indicate the area as in LK for Limerick. Each home owner will eventually remember their own postcode so it won't be an issue.

Emergency services can still work on normal addresses as postcodes may not always be known.

I think there is a lot of simple negativity in the media and by some posters here who just believe it will fail regardless.
Once introduced and people use it for a few years (it will take a while) them the benefits can be realised in my opinion.

murpho999

ukoda wrote: »

I don't think I can explain it any simpler.

UK address data = large
Irish address data = small

If large data can fit easily on a sat nav, this means small can also fit easily.

The amount of raw data needed on a sat nav to allow you navigate to 29 million unique addreses in the UK is less than the amount of raw data needed to navigate to 2.2 million unique addresses in Ireland. Therefore it can fit on a sat nav.

That's as basic as it gets.

You are really overestimating the size of simple text files which is all address lines would be,

Also who cares about sat navs, they are on their way out and being out phased by phones with on line abilities.

oscarBravo

plodder wrote: »

My guess would be that they work it out relative to the postcode location and the road geometry that they have already in their mapping.

So for every address, there's a reference to a postcode and some geometric data from which to calculate a lat/long; whereas for every eircode, there's a lat/long.

I'm still not seeing how the former is a more compact representation.

ukoda

murpho999 wrote: »

You are really overestimating the size of simple text files which is all address lines would be,

Also who cares about sat navs, they are on their way out and being out phased by phones with on line abilities.

I'm not. My point is that the data is tiny. When I say "large" for the UK I'm speaking relatively in comparison to Irelands database. Neither tho are large in general terms of databases.

Personally. I don't care if it's on a sat nav or not. I've all but abandoned mine in favour of the far superior Google maps, but I just wanted to make the point that it is totally incorrect to say that ericode is too big to fit on the current sat navs we use.

oscarBravo

murpho999 wrote: »

Each home owner will eventually remember their own postcode so it won't be an issue.

Emergency services can still work on normal addresses as postcodes may not always be know.

This is the way I've been looking at it.

At the moment, if someone rings us to see whether we can provide a service (wireless broadband), we need to figure out where they are. This almost invariably involves a process of giving directions, with us following along on Google Maps. It's slow, it's tedious, and it's error-prone.

In a few months' time, I expect that we'll be able to ask potential customers if they know their eircode. If they do, we'll have a precise location a couple of seconds later. If not, we'll do the directions dance.

Similarly, when it comes to actually visiting a customer's premises, either Google Maps will integrate eircodes, in which case our engineers can navigate straight to the customer using their eircode, or else we'll have an easy lookup to a lat/long.

I've seen the argument that people might just as well memorise their latitude and longitude as their eircode, which is nonsense. How many people have you met who had the WGS84 coordinates of their house memorised? How many people in countries with postcodes don't know theirs?

antoinolachtnai

murpho999 wrote: »

Why would a postcode be required to easily indicate the area as in LK for Limerick. Each home owner will eventually remember their own postcode so it won't be an issue.

It's just the idea that an address (and a postcode) should be meaningful. Eircode is deliberately designed not to be meaningful. To find out the meaning, even the general meaning you have to look up the code in a proprietary database.

plodder

oscarBravo wrote: »

So for every address, there's a reference to a postcode and some geometric data from which to calculate a lat/long; whereas for every eircode, there's a lat/long.

I'm still not seeing how the former is a more compact representation.

There are 2.2 million postcodes in the UK. These postcodes correspond to thoroughfares (ie addresses minus the building number). Additionally, you might have numbering information (eg odd numbers on left, even numbers on right, number 1 is at this end of the street etc) associated with each record.

The point is you can find any address in the UK based on these 2.2 million records and there is no need to replicate it 25 times for each address on the same street. With Eircode that is not possible because of the randomness.

murpho999 wrote: »

I think there is a lot of simple negativity in the media and by some posters here who just believe it will fail regardless.
Once introduced and people use it for a few years (it will take a while) them the benefits can be realised in my opinion.

I think only one poster is saying it will fail. Others are expressing concern about certain aspects and questioning the "explanations" for some design decision. There wasn't any public consultation for the design. So, it's hardly unreasonable that people would give their opinion on it now and the purpose of this discussion is that if some of the problems highlighted here do arise, they won't be able to claim they didn't know it would happen due to the unique and ground-breaking nature of the system etc.

oscarBravo

plodder wrote: »

There are 2.2 million postcodes in the UK. These postcodes correspond to thoroughfares (ie addresses minus the building number). Additionally, you might have numbering information (eg odd numbers on left, even numbers on right, number 1 is at this end of the street etc) associated with each record.

The point is you can find any address in the UK based on these 2.2 million records and there is no need to replicate it 25 times for each address on the same street. With Eircode that is not possible because of the randomness.

So, in summary, your argument is that although it's possible to store 2.2 million postcodes in a satnav, complete with references to specific thoroughfares and detailed algorithms for locating house numbers along those thoroughfares, it would be impossible to store 2-plus million eircodes on a satnav, along with two floating-point numbers for each one?

Still not seeing it, sorry.

plodder

oscarBravo wrote: »

So, in summary, your argument is that although it's possible to store 2.2 million postcodes in a satnav, complete with references to specific thoroughfares and detailed algorithms for locating house numbers along those thoroughfares, it would be impossible to store 2-plus million eircodes on a satnav, along with two floating-point numbers for each one?

Where did I say anything like that? My point is that it's incorrect to say that because Eircodes will have to be stored as individual records, other postcodes like the UK's are also stored as individual records.

Here's a question for you. When someone is building a new house and they want to sign up for your service, they might or might not have an Eircode assigned, but it won't be reflected in Eircodes updates for up to three months hence, and then has to be adopted by Google etc. If Eircode was (more) hierarchical then your customer would already know the first five characters of their Eircode, because it would be the same as their neighbours and you would already know their location down to the level of small area. Would that not be better than asking the customer to get their neighbour's full Eircode and you using that?

Would questions like the above not be better debated before the design is finalised?

ukoda

plodder wrote: »

There are 2.2 million postcodes in the UK. These postcodes correspond to thoroughfares (ie addresses minus the building number). Additionally, you might have numbering information (eg odd numbers on left, even numbers on right, number 1 is at this end of the street etc) associated with each record.

The point is you can find any address in the UK based on these 2.2 million records and there is no need to replicate it 25 times for each address on the same street. With Eircode that is not possible because of the randomness.

I think only one poster is saying it will fail. Others are expressing concern about certain aspects and questioning the "explanations" for some design decision. There wasn't any public consultation for the design. So, it's hardly unreasonable that people would give their opinion on it now and the purpose of this discussion is that if some of the problems highlighted here do arise, they won't be able to claim they didn't know it would happen due to the unique and ground-breaking nature of the system etc.

Well first of all there are 1.8 million UK postcodes with 29 million unique addreses.

So ill ask the same question the other poster did.
1.8 million postcodes with 29 million unique combinations is ok for a sat nav
2.2 million postcodes with 2.2 million unique combinations is not???

Do you see how ridiculous you are being. Your argument is totally flawed and you're trying to skew the facts with this thing about replicating.

Look at it in terms of pure data. The data required for Irelands ericode and addresses to work on a sat nav is SMALLER than that needed for the UK postcode and addresses to work on a sat nav.

GerardKeating

antoinolachtnai wrote: »

It's just the idea that an address (and a postcode) should be meaningful. Eircode is deliberately designed not to be meaningful. To find out the meaning, even the general meaning you have to look up the code in a proprietary database.

So you think "BT1 11A" is a descriptive code? EirCode is no worse than the UK system. No better either as a descriptive code.

murpho999

antoinolachtnai wrote: »

It's just the idea that an address (and a postcode) should be meaningful. Eircode is deliberately designed not to be meaningful. To find out the meaning, even the general meaning you have to look up the code in a proprietary database.

Why does a postcode have to be meaningful?

I used to live in Holland (a country often cited as efficient etc) and their postcode is 4 numbers and 2 letters.

My postcode was 2133HW.

It means nothing to the local area, absolutely nothing.

Only after use after years of that area being '2133' does it mean anything.

The postcodes were only used for delivery purposes who had databases and and people would still use addresses as normal to know where they are going.

I really don't see the issues that people mention here as really being issues, especially the laughable privacy one.

plodder

GerardKeating wrote: »

So you think "BT1 11A" is a descriptive code? EirCode is no worse than the UK system. No better either as a descriptive code.

BT = Belfast, but covers the whole of Northern Ireland.

BT11 is the city centre of Belfast itself. You can find it on a map such as this one

http://free-postcode-maps.co.uk/postcode-area/bt-belfast-postcode-map/

BT1 11A is some street within that area.

@ukoda. Thanks for the correction about 1.8 million vs 2.2 million. But, you're just ignoring my point rather than rebutting it.

ukoda

plodder wrote: »

@ukoda. Thanks for the correction about 1.8 million vs 2.2 million. But, you're just ignoring my point rather than rebutting it.

nope. I've made it pretty crystal clear where you've gone wrong in you workings.

You still can't answer the simple question why a sat nav can handle all of the UKs much larger address database but will struggle with Irelands much smaller one.

Are you some how under the impression that the alphabet used in eircode is much bigger in size to the alphabet used in the UK postcode?
Maybe the numbers are bigger??

Let's face facts here.
The UK database is called the PAF, it is so large that Royal Mail will not allow it to be downloaded as one file. They split it and zip it for download. Yet every postcode and address combination in the UK can fit on a sat nav that also had the rest of Europe on it.

The Irish database is called the ECAD it is about 10 times smaller than the PAF but of a similar format.