National Postcodes to be introduced

ukoda

recedite wrote: »

As you well know, that "unique ID" assigned to everyone who registered for property tax is simply a reference number and cannot be linked to a particular house by an inspector on the ground.
For the same reason, Irish Water are asking people what colour their front doors are painted.
And when they start inspecting septic tanks, it will be the same story.

Houses inspected and assessed for BER certificates are matched to the MPRN numbers because currently MPRN numbers are the nearest to a unique identifier.
MPRNs are also checked by the solicitor during conveyancing as part of the "search" to establish title and ID

so all these things will be easier and more efficient with eircode?! damn it. i like my government and its agencies to be as inefficient as possible. thats the way its always been here in ireland and ill be damned if they start changing things now:rolleyes:

ukoda

Sam Russell wrote: »

I am not thinking of this for helpful uses, but for the likes of Irish Water and other unpopular gatherers of data.

the thing is....An Post will still deliver your Water Bill, but it might take longer if their system reads the address to include an eircode and the readers flag it as a mismatch, then a human has to intervene and correct the wrong code, so all you've done is cause work for An Post and maybe added an extra day to your bill delivery time.....not quite a massive victory for the anti water protesters....

ukoda

SpaceTime wrote: »

I 100% guarantee you though that UK companies will be saying "I'm sorry that postcode isn't valid." and "computa says no!" for many years to come.

I had a call centre agent yesterday telling me that 00 353 85 isn't a mobile number and that my mobile number needed to start with 07

if its a UK site then yes unfortunately they will want a UK validated postcode, but then again, a german postcode won't validate, nor will a french one....etc etc.

to be fair, it will happen in reverse too, a Northern Ireland customer trying to order from a company here that use ECAD address validation will be told, sorry not a valid postcode,

i wouldn't expect other countries in the world to buy ECAD and use it for address validation. most companies are taking a smarter approach with this now if they sell/ship overseas, i.e. if you pick your Country as a non UK one, then they switch off postcode validation and make it free text, not all do this, but they should

JohnC.

I've yet to come across a website that needed a valid code. Many will require a code, but not a valid one. So . or 0 or 00000 will usually work to tick that box off as completed.

dr.fuzzenstein

Kahless wrote: »

I've yet to come across a website that needed a valid code. Many will require a code, but not a valid one. So . or 0 or 00000 will usually work to tick that box off as completed.

For US use 90210 and the UK SW1A 1AA. :pac:

recedite

ukoda wrote: »

so all these things will be easier and more efficient with eircode?! damn it. i like my government and its agencies to be as inefficient as possible. thats the way its always been here in ireland and ill be damned if they start changing things now:rolleyes:

Why this strawman continually?

I'm in favour of efficient tax collection; it makes the taxes cheaper.

I'm in favour of "a property tax", but a Site Value Tax would have been better.

I'm in favour of paying for treated water; people just waste it otherwise. But it would have been better to let Siemens install the meters instead of paying a higher amount to Denis O Brien, and baling out a bankrupt company for him to use too.

I'm in favour of one state-endorsed system of user friendly location codes for this country, and also a state-registered unique identifier for every property. But not eircodes, they are just PPS numbers for houses. Even without the "anomalies" in the tendering process which were an extra insult to the public and will result in ongoing high maintenance costs, eircodes are "better than nothing", but not much more than that.

ukoda

recedite wrote: »

Why this strawman continually?


I'm in favour of one state-endorsed system of user friendly location codes for this country, and also a state-registered unique identifier for every property. But not eircodes, they are just PPS numbers for houses. Even without the "anomalies" in the tendering process which were an extra insult to the public and will result in ongoing high maintenance costs, eircodes are "better than nothing", but not much more than that.

you want state endorsed and sate registered and then you say "they are just PPS numbers for houses".....implying some sort of negative connotation by referencing PPS? well PPS is state endorsed and state registered.

Eircode ticks all the boxes you outline above, but you've a personal bias that started with the tender process and now nothing that comes from it is good enough for you, despite it being exactly what you describe you want.

you can have issues with the tender process, you can have issues with the government, you can issues with Capita, fair enough, but be fair to the code itself and maybe you'll realise the huge benefit it will have.

dr.fuzzenstein

ukoda wrote: »

you want state endorsed and sate registered and then you say "they are just PPS numbers for houses".....implying some sort of negative connotation by referencing PPS? well PPS is state endorsed and state registered.

Eircode ticks all the boxes you outline above, but you've a personal bias that started with the tender process and now nothing that comes from it is good enough for you, despite it being exactly what you describe you want.

you can have issues with the tender process, you can have issues with the government, you can issues with Capita, fair enough, but be fair to the code itself and maybe you'll realise the huge benefit it will have.

There will always people who have decided "nope, don't like it" and will then start a life consuming agenda against something and in the end go mad because they can't stop it. You can spot them, old, haggard looking, scruffy, dirty clothes, walking down the street having loud arguments with themselves. It's a very sad sight.
The dogs are barking, but the train keeps rolling.

TheBustedFlush

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

There will always people who have decided "nope, don't like it" and will then start a life consuming agenda against something and in the end go mad because they can't stop it. You can spot them, old, haggard looking, scruffy, dirty clothes, walking down the street having loud arguments with themselves. It's a very sad sight.
The dogs are barking, but the train keeps rolling.

You mean any old, haggard looking, scruffy, dirty clothes, person walking down the street having loud arguments with themselves just fits a stereotype in your head?

HardenendMan

ukoda wrote: »

the thing is....An Post will still deliver your Water Bill, but it might take longer if their system reads the address to include an eircode and the readers flag it as a mismatch, then a human has to intervene and correct the wrong code, so all you've done is cause work for An Post and maybe added an extra day to your bill delivery time.....not quite a massive victory for the anti water protesters....

Generally the address reading systems don't take postcodes as gospel. They need to find a strong correlation with rest of the address. It's all based on confidence levels of each decision id imagine. No human intervention.

ukoda

HardenendMan wrote: »

Generally the address reading systems don't take postcodes as gospel. They need to find a strong correlation with rest of the address. It's all based on confidence levels of each decision id imagine. No human intervention.

There's human intervention when something goes wrong and the machine can't read it, so if the postcode says Galway and the address says Cork, I doubt they will program the readers to override one or the other, so I'd say it'll get sent into the pile of "machine can't read these" that are then eyeballed by a human.

However if the postcode is nonsense, then it'll prob just ignore it and use the address. Either way, won't do any damage to anyone and won't be very effective anti water protest.

Impetus

ukoda wrote: »

There's human intervention when something goes wrong and the machine can't read it, so if the postcode says Galway and the address says Cork, I doubt they will program the readers to override one or the other, so I'd say it'll get sent into the pile of "machine can't read these" that are then eyeballed by a human.

However if the postcode is nonsense, then it'll prob just ignore it and use the address. Either way, won't do any damage to anyone and won't be very effective anti water protest.

The current sorting system matches multiple elements in the entire address, and compares it with the database of valid addresses. A random postcode would be ignored in the process. If in the analysis the street was from one town and the town was another and the postcode was in another, the envelope would be barcoded with the usual serial number, and a scanned image of the address shown to a human being at a VDU to interpret as best they can. I suspect there is a scoring system in play and if the address scores a high enough % in terms of matches with valid addresses, it is accepted, and the lat/long co-ordinates of the delivery point are those of the address which passes the minimum score of valid matches.

The big issue is that most developed countries don't need them (postcodes) to sort mail. They just need accurate, legible addresses. By accurate I mean road name standardization, house number, and town name. No need for county or anything else. And no need for house names - just the house or building number.

Because digits are easier to accurately machine read than alpha-numeric stuff, especially when hand-written, an all numeric postcode can help improve the process, because it is more machine-readable. It is also useful for humans - eg all postcodes beginning with 2 are in the SW of the country, 6 midwest, etc. The first digit can give one a good rough idea with little knowledge. But the extremely dumb and clueless Oirish Eircode has none of these advantages. To make matters even more clueless the last part uses a random number generator.

The most intelligently managed countries in Europe have short postcodes - eg Switzerland, Austria and Denmark 4 digits - even big Germany had 4 digit postcodes until unification, when they had to make space for the eastern portion. The dumbest, most cluelessly managed countries have long codes - eg Britain, Ireland (soon?), Iran, Israel. While the US theoretically has a 9 digit code, it is largely ignored and just 5 digits are in general use.

Impetus

Another dumb state moves to long postcodes. Israel. Hitherto, it had a regular 5 digit system, except that the code was shown after the city name (as in the US) rather than before the city/town as in most of the rest of the world.

Now the Israeli postcode is seven numeric digits – which has more than enough space for each human being in this tiny country to be numbered. In the same club as Iran. While one might allow for the fact that Hebrew, which uses its own (non-Roman) character set, undoubtedly has a problem with OCR scanning and recognition of text – not to mention address communication with non-Hebrew speakers, (virtually the entire planet speaks 0123456789 etc), IsraelPost require bulk mailers to use a 16 digit code for addressing junk mail to qualify for postage discounts, which makes one wonder about the “intelligence” of the system.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/israel-post-has-your-number-all-7-digits-of-it.premium-1.491210

SpaceTime

The Netherlands uses alphanumeric postcodes too.

1234 AB

Most Euro codes don't define anything to any degree of detail and would be equivalent to the routing code in eircode

Modern OCR has no issues with alphanumeric codes. It's not 1975!

oscarBravo

Impetus wrote: »

The most intelligently managed countries in Europe have short postcodes - eg Switzerland, Austria and Denmark 4 digits...

In Denmark, the postal worker won't deliver the mail unless there's a name on the mailbox that matches the name on the envelope. The mail won't even get to the delivery worker - it will be returned to sender by the system - if the postcode is on the wrong line of the address. Every house in Denmark has a number on a uniquely-named road within the postcode area.

This isn't a problem in Denmark, because Denmark is populated with Danes - the sort of people who voted in the last election for the party that promised to raise taxes. The sort of people who obediently inform the government when they move house in order to make sure that the water bills arrive.

If you want Danish-style systems in Ireland, you're going to need a Danish-style electorate - and you'll be waiting.

ukoda

Impetus wrote: »

The most intelligently managed countries in Europe have short postcodes - eg Switzerland, Austria and Denmark 4 digits - even big Germany had 4 digit postcodes until unification, when they had to make space for the eastern portion. The dumbest, most cluelessly managed countries have long codes - eg Britain, Ireland (soon?), Iran, Israel. While the US theoretically has a 9 digit code, it is largely ignored and just 5 digits are in general use.

These countries introduced their postcodes decades ago and as you say yourself, they are mostly redundant now for mail sorting. They aren't much good on their own either for navigation as they don't pinpoint anything.

So tell me, what's so amazing about these postcodes? Why exactly do you think they are a shining example of the right way to do a post code and in the same breath tell us that they are redundant now anyway.

Eircode is the entire address in one code. Major advantages to this.

I don't want a German postcode that covers a vast area and Is useless for anything else.

Impetus

oscarBravo wrote: »

In Denmark, the postal worker won't deliver the mail unless there's a name on the mailbox that matches the name on the envelope. The mail won't even get to the delivery worker - it will be returned to sender by the system - if the postcode is on the wrong line of the address. Every house in Denmark has a number on a uniquely-named road within the postcode area.

This isn't a problem in Denmark, because Denmark is populated with Danes - the sort of people who voted in the last election for the party that promised to raise taxes. The sort of people who obediently inform the government when they move house in order to make sure that the water bills arrive.

If you want Danish-style systems in Ireland, you're going to need a Danish-style electorate - and you'll be waiting.

Denmark needs postal competition - rather than having a civil service monopoly doing the job. Assigning a unique postcode to each address, with a unique lat/long accurate to 1 m, a la Eircode is more useful to a dictator state and less useful to the user-friendly / business-friendly state for - for visiting, delivery etc. Giving everybody a street / road name and house number and sharing a numeric postcode over a broad area for general use would be far more user friendly than assigning a PPSN to every house and commercial building and pretending it is a postcode.

At the extreme ends of the scale there are two types of state

Imperial or Federal.

I suspect that "water payment compliance" as in paying your water bill is far higher in Switzerland where water (ultra clean, almost zero chemicals, aside from ozone gas) costs about EUR 1,00 per m3. Compared with imperialist countries where "water", complete with cancer causing chemicals, is priced at EUR 3,00+. People living in federal environments do not have to put up with so-called republican or imperial state government rip-offs.

Impetus

ukoda wrote: »

Eircode is the entire address in one code. Major advantages to this.

Therein doth lie the problem. The Eircode if it is ever implemented will be useless to the the human being in terms of finding a place. An Post don't need it. Regular postcodes make sense to humans - eg Dublin 2. This only applies to a single city. So make it 1002, as part of a national code. Virtually every other postcode system on the planet started off as postal district numbers for a single city. And grew up. We are still waiting for Ireland's non-system to grow up.

Wherein doth the advantages lie in A02 G3ZZ lie, please?

Successful systems are invariably simple.

ukoda

Impetus wrote: »

Therein doth lie the problem. The Eircode if it is ever implemented will be useless to the the human being in terms of finding a place. An Post don't need it. Regular postcodes make sense to humans - eg Dublin 2. This only applies to a single city. So make it 1002, as part of a national code. Virtually every other postcode system on the planet started off as postal district numbers for a single city. And grew up. We are still waiting for Ireland's non-system to grow up.

Wherein doth the advantages lie in A02 G3ZZ lie, please?

Successful systems are invariably simple.

In about a month I get a code in my letter box (and sorry you can stop the "if it ever happens" line, it's launching with a timeline provided to us for when we get our code) I will be able to give this code to anyone and they will be able to find me. Business will be able to do address validation, fraud prevention, data capture etc etc.

Welcome to 2015, the age of technology

Having a code that I can look at and go..."oh yeah that's probably somewhere in Kerry right? If I remember correctly" is **** all use to anyone in the modern age when I can whip out my smartphone and type 7 characters and hey presto I'm on the way to your house or business.

What decade doth one believe they reside in?

Because you're acting like its 1960.

SpaceTime

It's pretty bad that in Cork City I can usually get a much better idea of where somewhere is based on the phone number's first 3 digits that identify what exchange it was originally allocated on (on most numbers anyway) than I can from the existing addresses!

I'd rather the routing codes were suburb sized like that or smaller.

long_b

ukoda wrote: »

.I will be able to give this code to anyone and they will be able to find me. Business will be able to do address validation, fraud prevention, data capture etc etc

Thought I read on here that businesses will have to pay to have access to the database to get your location from your postcode?
Can't see any free apps coming for small couriers etc if that's the case?

ukoda

SpaceTime wrote: »

It's pretty bad that in Cork City I can usually get a much better idea of where somewhere is based on the phone number's first 3 digits that identify what exchange it was originally allocated on (on most numbers anyway) than I can from the existing addresses!

I'd rather the routing codes were suburb sized like that or smaller.

To be fair, knowing someone is in Douglas doesn't do you much good does it?

ukoda

long_b wrote: »

Thought I read on here that businesses will have to pay to have access to the database to get your location from your postcode?
Can't see any free apps coming for small couriers etc if that's the case?

Yup you pay for access if you're a business. Don't worry up until a few years ago you'd to pay for any access to the UK postcode and there was plenty of apps floating around, it's a return on investment scenario, spend the money and deliver a better service. And access to the database is priced to be well within the reach of any small business.

SpaceTime

ukoda wrote: »

To be fair, knowing someone is in Douglas doesn't do you much good does it?

It does if you've some vague address like 32 Blah Road

oscarBravo

Impetus wrote: »

Giving everybody a street / road name and house number and sharing a numeric postcode over a broad area for general use would be far more user friendly than assigning a PPSN to every house and commercial building and pretending it is a postcode.

...and we're back to the argument that it would be a better idea to change almost every address in the country than to add a 7-character code to existing addresses.

Yes, it would be better if we had unique addresses. And yes, if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.

There's very little more frustrating in this whole eircode conversation than people continuously rabbiting on about how we wouldn't need unique postcodes if we had unique addresses. We don't have unique addresses. We're not going to have unique addresses. Deal with it.

Or don't. Whatever. While you're busy refusing to deal with that reality, eircodes already have.

Impetus wrote: »

Regular postcodes make sense to humans - eg Dublin 2.

If only eircodes had something as simple as "D02" for that same geographic area.

If only.

Carawaystick

Impetus wrote: »

I suspect that "water payment compliance" as in paying your water bill is far higher in Switzerland where water (ultra clean, almost zero chemicals, aside from ozone gas) costs about EUR 1,00 per m3. Compared with imperialist countries where "water", complete with cancer causing chemicals, is priced at EUR 3,00+. People living in federal environments do not have to put up with so-called republican or imperial state government rip-offs.

But the Swiss Confederation dumps all their pollution on mostly France and Germany, where else does their secondary treated sewage end up?

diomed

23 Jun 2014 www.eircode.ie
"​Letters will be sent to 2.2 million households across the country next spring with details of their new postcodes, it was announced yesterday."

What happened?

irishgeo

diomed wrote: »

23 Jun 2014 www.eircode.ie
"​Letters will be sent to 2.2 million households across the country next spring with details of their new postcodes, it was announced yesterday."

What happened?

a delay. its june now.

dr.fuzzenstein

irishgeo wrote: »

a delay. its june now.

Any decade now...

SpaceTime

It'll be September before long!