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UK codes (again)  XML
Forum Index -> Administrative Divisions
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marinheiro



Joined: 19/09/2007 13:24:33
Messages: 5
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Reading over bits and pieces here, on the mailing list and on the blog I'm a little confused about the current state of the UK administrative fields.

I've seen several suggestions that people should make manual corrections, but there still seem to be errors in the data while the whole set of UK data is available (in rdf form) from the site Marc mentioned on his blog:

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/ontology/

Is there any reason not to upload that file? Are they different codes from the ones that are currently in use (so I'm seeing data errors when they're actually a different set of codes)?

Secondly, for my own purposes I could really do with something at a higher level than counties. Mark mentioned the OS are standardizing on GORs as a top level administrative descriptor and hinted at the possibility of shifting the UK administrative fields along by one to make room for them; is there still any plan to do that?

I'm new to all this, let me know if I've got the wrong end of the stick..

Graham

marc



Joined: 08/12/2005 07:39:47
Messages: 4412
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Hi Graham

At the moment we use fips codes for first order administrative divisions for nearly all country. I think it might lead to confusion if we just switch isolated countries to iso codes instead of fips codes. For most of our users these codes for the UK don't seem to be that urgent. We try to use our users wishes to prioritize the work and have therefore assigned a low priority to this task.

As for the OS file. While it is a usefule resource it does not include lat/lng and we still need other sources to get the lat/lng from and combine it with the OS information.

Regards

Marc

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marinheiro



Joined: 19/09/2007 13:24:33
Messages: 5
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OK, that's fine. In that case I will create my own local version. At a quick look it seems most of the missing lat/long information is for the districts, and I may be able to approximate those for myself. If there are any missing for the parishes I'll try to pull the info from openstreetmap. I don't need total acccuracy on the physical positions, just on the nesting of the admin areas, so that should be enough for my needs

Thanks
Graham

marc



Joined: 08/12/2005 07:39:47
Messages: 4412
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Hi Graham

Do you think you would like to share your updates and improvements with us?

Regards

Marc

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marinheiro



Joined: 19/09/2007 13:24:33
Messages: 5
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I'll try to maintain my information in a separate table so I can feed it back to you if you decide to change from FIPs in the future. I'll mail you off line when I have some data - at the moment this is all hypothetical...

I assume there are no copyirght issues in combining openstreetmap and geonames information?

Graham
marc



Joined: 08/12/2005 07:39:47
Messages: 4412
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GeoNames is using the more liberal 'by' license in contrast to openstreetmap which is using the attribution-sharealike license. We would have to ask the copyright holder if we are allowed to redistribute the data with a more liberal 'by' license.

Cheers

Marc

[WWW]
marinheiro



Joined: 19/09/2007 13:24:33
Messages: 5
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OK, so I have more or less what I need, but I think it's probably not good enough quality to feed back into geonames.

The admin classification I went with is:

ADM1: Government Office Regions. For these I visually estimated the centroids for lat/lon. As with the statistics.gov data, Scotland and Wales are treated 'as if' GORs and have a GOR code. For some reason NI is not included in their data.

ADM2: Metropolitan districts, Counties, (Quasi)Unitary Authorities, London Boroughs: these were all in the geonames database anyway

ADM3: Districts. Most of these were not in the geonames database. For the missing ones I again estimated centroids by eye. The result is not very accurate at all; I realise later it would have been better to establish the town which is the seat of the District Council in each case, then look up the lat/lon of that. But the result is good enough for my own purposes, so I probably won't redo them.

ADM4: Parishes. I matched the government parish names against population centres in geonames (including alternatenames), disambiguating where several have the same name by finding the closest to the district centroid and rejecting if none was within 50 miles.
After that I have 7,319 parishes identified with the geoname equivalents (and so with lat/lon) , but still have 3,969 that don't appear to be in geonames. I'm surprised the number is so high.

I tried identifying the missing parishes using the data from openstreetmap, but that only gets me another 238. So there are still 3000 or so UK parishes that don't seem to be in any free datasets (unless I have got something wrong somewhere)

Another route to achieve the same thing would be simply to use the district shapefiles to identify all parishes within their boundaries. But I don't have them...

Graham


 
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