Eircode - its implemetation (merged)

plodder

astrofool wrote: »

What an absurd conclusion to take from that article, completely and utterly absurd that only a fool could make.

It turns out putting the data together, though painstaking, has worked, and cost 2 staff wages over 3 years to do so (so, at most 1% of the cost you have above) and out of it they have a very accurate system which they can use into the future, only possible because we now have eircodes and BER ratings.

What an utterly bizarre rant.

More personal attacks from the eircode crowd...

The post that you are attacking is substantially correct as eircode did not help with linking the two databases (contrary to what has been stated already on this thread).

Otherwise why would six man years of painstaking work have been required?

Irish Times wrote:

However, the agency had no direct way of linking the databases; effectively there was no unique crossover code.

“It’s very rare for addresses to be spelled the same in each database, you can have all sorts of variations,” Patrick explains, noting the Irish-English component combined with abridged rural addresses complicated matters.

The CSO used an algorithm to match the addresses of about 60,000 properties in the three databases.

But that still left the majority – 100,000 properties – unmatched. That would have to be done manually and the job was handed to two CSO staff – a painstaking process that took more than three years.

The BER register uses ESB MPRNs as unique identifier, rather than eircodes, it appears.

PDVerse

Impetus wrote: »

In an article published in today's (22.10.2016) Irish Times, the CSO (cso.ie) is having problems working out house price increases using the Eircode. Their primary source of data is mortgages advanced and stamp tax filings.

They need to be able to combine these two sources of data (and I suspect others) to come to a more accurate view of house price movements. There is little or no address consistency between mortgage data and stamp tax filings for property transfers. Because almost 50% of houses in Ireland do not have a street/road name and house number. There is no standard address for every building. The CSO forced nearly €50 million to be wasted on developing a postcode system - and Ireland came up with the most stupidly designed system on the planet. Which few people use.

In continental Europe, and most other developed countries, every street/road has a name and every building a number and these are associated with the nearest town name. The town name is usually prefixed by a numerical postcode, which is easy to remember and used 99% of the time by everybody.

Back in the day there was a term when computers first emerged "computerizing chaos". Irish addressing, especially, but not exclusively, in rural areas is chaotic.

The CSO has been allowed by waste 50 mil computerizing chaos, and still can't by their own admission give the public accurate information on house price movements.

The arrogance of government (especially permanent government) in Ireland knows no limits. And this is regretfully matched with their incompetence.

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/cso-house-price-index-built-on-complex-foundations-1.2838474

This is a laughably ridiculous rant. It doesn't merit a serious response, and anyway I simply couldn't compete with the responses from pedroeibar1 to a similarly ridiculous rant from Impetus. http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057660708&page=2

GreenFolder2

To be honest, the problem isn't Eircode per se. It's the refusal to implement anything approaching logical or sensible addresses in Ireland.

A lot of addresses are still:

Name
House Name (often not even displayed)
Townland
Big Town
County

Or
Business Name
Townland
City/County.

Even in Dublin and Cork you get something like:
The Enterprise
Huge Technology Park
Dublin 24

When you arrive you find the tech park is the size of a small town and there are no street names or block numbers. There are a few modern exceptions to this and well numbered places, but the majority are diabolically bad. I waste so much time going around in circles trying to find businesses when I have to go out to call into one.

Then in towns and cities you often have illogical numbering or no numbering in some areas or numbers exist but are inconsistently displayed or put where you can't see them (hall door up a long front garden).

Cork has some real doozies like streets where the numbering is non sequential due to fill-ins over the years or use of some kind of prehistoric numbering from a site map from the Viking era that bears no resemblance to the actual sequence of the buildings.

No postal code system could solve this problem. You need to actually number buildings and name roads. Otherwise, you're just giving people a codified grid reference whether it's Eircode's private hashed pay-for-access model or any of the open systems like Loc8 and OpenPostcode.

I literally have no idea how An Post delivers mail in my area other than by the postman knowing the route. There are hundreds of houses and there is no numbering system, just a mix of house names and no house names (just name of deliveree and street!). It's completely bonkers.

An Post (and its predecessors) and the local authorities should never have allowed this nutty "system" to evolve in the first place.

I can see what they were *trying* to do with Eircode, but it still doesn't really solve the problem of no addresses. All they've really done is create unique ID codes for every building in the country and link them to a map. It's better than nothing, but it will never provide the kind of ease-of-use a logical structured human readable address would.

LeinsterDub

GreenFolder2 wrote: »

I can see what they were *trying* to do with Eircode, but it still doesn't really solve the problem of no addresses. All they've really done is create unique ID codes for every building in the country and link them to a map. It's better than nothing, but it will never provide the kind of ease-of-use a logical structured human readable address would.

A unique code and the ability to be guided to the door. What more do you need?

PDVerse

plodder wrote: »

More personal attacks from the eircode crowd...

The post that you are attacking is substantially correct as eircode did not help with linking the two databases (contrary to what has been stated already on this thread).

Otherwise why would six man years of painstaking work have been required?


The BER register uses ESB MPRNs as unique identifier, rather than eircodes, it appears.

SEAI have added Eircodes to BER records, which allows the data to be matched to other datasets. Do they also have other identifiers? Yes. Is that relevant? No. Address databases with Eircodes are a doddle to match compared to databases that don't. This is a benefit of Eircode. Trying to spin it as anything else simply unmasks the ridiculous bias of the poster.

PDVerse

GreenFolder2 wrote: »

No postal code system could solve this problem. You need to actually number buildings and name roads. Otherwise, you're just giving people a codified grid reference whether it's Eircode's private hashed pay-for-access model or any of the open systems like Loc8 and OpenPostcode.

Eircode is not a private hashed pay-for-access model. It is completely free for any member of the public to look-up, which they do to the tune of over twenty two thousand times a day on finder.eircode.ie

GreenFolder2

LeinsterDub wrote: »

A unique code and the ability to be guided to the door. What more do you need?

An address maybe that I could actually read ?

It seems we are not allowed to criticise anything about Ireland though.

Having lived in other countries, I have to say the addressing here is absolutely completely and utterly nuts. There is no logic to it at all. It's just basically some kind of rural, colloquial, peasant farmer style approach that was never systematised.

It probably comes down to the fact that the country was very low population and everyone knew everyone back in the day.

I literally cannot find businesses here a lot of the time without Google map searches and GPS look ups of all sorts. Typically there's nothing other than a really vague statement of a town or townland and a business name and that's about it.

My Little Company Plc
Athlone
Co. Westmeath

is not unusual.

I'm going to be very critical here but, it's completely stupid, it's unscientific, unsystematic, illogical and incompatible with the modern world. By modern, I mean post 18th century.

Eircode is just a state attempt to paper over the cracks in the system without any attempt to fix the underlying problem.

GreenFolder2

PDVerse wrote: »

Eircode is not a private hashed pay-for-access model. It is completely free for any member of the public to look-up, which they do to the tune of over twenty two thousand times a day on finder.eircode.ie

If I want to use eircode for a business, it is not free to use. It's hashed and I can't get any level of detail without basically breaching the T&Cs of use and resetting cookies over and over.

Also uptake is still very low and likely will be for years. So, basically I look up business names on Google Maps and don't bother with eircode at all as many people either don't provide one or aren't even aware of what it is in my experience.

When it comes to people calling to our office, I actually have to give them Google Maps URLs which is something that would be fairly unnecessary on the continent or in the US.
The UK sometimes needs it as they're kind of halfway house between Irish crazy and some degree of organised addressing.

plodder

PDVerse wrote: »

SEAI have added Eircodes to BER records, which allows the data to be matched to other datasets. Do they also have other identifiers? Yes. Is that relevant? No. Address databases with Eircodes are a doddle to match compared to databases that don't. This is a benefit of Eircode. Trying to spin it as anything else simply unmasks the ridiculous bias of the poster.

Most posters on this thread are biased. Let's just stick with what is and isn't factual.

There's a perception out there that the invention of Eircode just magically solves all of these addressing problems. It doesn't, because a large body of work has to be done to deal with the addressing inconsistencies, and put Eircodes into each dataset.

The electoral register is another example. The addition of eircodes to that dataset is another half-baked piece of work. Lots of people can't be found on it because the address in the register is different from the address associated the eircode. Until someone does exactly the same job with the electoral register that the CSO had to do with their data, this problem will persist.

It's a perfectly reasonable point to argue that standardising addresses would have been another way of solving the problem. I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's an arguable point, rather than deserving of insults and derision by the eircode crowd.

GreenFolder2

It's not every aspect of Ireland that's this illogical either.

For example: phone numbers here are very logical and structured, registration numbers on cars make a whole lot of sense, PPSN works well, bank account numbers are very logical formats.

Even Irish road numbering generally makes a lot of sense and is easy to follow (where signed anyway).

So it's not some kind of cultural thing, it's just the legacy of the addressing problem not ever having had anyone mandated to deal with it. From what I can see addresses here just "happen". Where as in other countries either the postal authorities or the local authorises or a combination of both are charged with actually ensuring some kind of consistent system exists.

Fixing it in Ireland would be a mammoth task at this stage, but it's not something we should just pretend isn't a problem.

PDVerse

plodder wrote: »

Most posters on this thread are biased. Let's just stick with what is and isn't factual.

There's a perception out there that the invention of Eircode just magically solves all of these addressing problems. It doesn't, because a large body of work has to be done to deal with the addressing inconsistencies, and put Eircodes into each dataset.

The electoral register is another example. The addition of eircodes to that dataset is another half-baked piece of work. Lots of people can't be found on it because the address in the register is different from the address associated the eircode. Until someone does exactly the same job with the electoral register that the CSO had to do with their data, this problem will persist.

It's a perfectly reasonable point to argue that standardising addresses would have been another way of solving the problem. I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's an arguable point, rather than deserving of insults and derision by the eircode crowd.

We agree. Eircode isn't magic, work is required to gain benefit. The benefits are larger than the costs, which is why organisations are investing. Eircode solves the problems identified in the cheapest, most efficient manner possible, so its difficult to argue that a more expensive option that would take longer to implement and longer to reach adoption is a valid option.

GreenFolder2

There should be an aim to standardise addresses here even if it takes decades and decades to achieve. A lot of new buildings come on stream every year and a high % of them fall into that chaotic system.

It would be easy enough to impose some order on it and just gradually rollout logical addressing bit by bit over the coming years.

One simple thing would be to insist that business parks and tech parks had some kind of logical structure to their numbers. There are great examples where block numbering is being used but, there's no reason why those places couldn't just be numbered to avoid all sorts of chaos.

Also just number houses along every road using something like distance markers. It could easily be done when a road is being resurfaced or signage is being updated.

You don't even have to name the road, as every local road here has an L number already.

Assume you go something like first km along the road is 100 to 199, next km is 200 to 299, next one is 300-399..

You end up with a rural address like

Sean and Mary O'Boardie
204 L12345 = the 4th building on L1234
Ballytown
Co. Kerry
X99 1234

That gives you pin point accuracy and an ability to find things without having to go mad looking them up on GPS devices.

Even just use something like L1234-2 meaning 2km roughly along that road.

There's some kind of hostility to actually naming roads here, but they are all numbered.

PDVerse

GreenFolder2 wrote: »

If I want to use eircode for a business, it is not free to use. It's hashed and I can't get any level of detail without basically breaching the T&Cs of use and resetting cookies over and over.

Also uptake is still very low and likely will be for years. So, basically I look up business names on Google Maps and don't bother with eircode at all as many people either don't provide one or aren't even aware of what it is in my experience.

When it comes to people calling to our office, I actually have to give them Google Maps URLs which is something that would be fairly unnecessary on the continent or in the US.
The UK sometimes needs it as they're kind of halfway house between Irish crazy and some degree of organised addressing.

You can use the free Autoaddress app (disclosure: I own Autoaddress) or you can enter an Eircode in Google Maps (only approximately 1.75 million of the 2 million Eircodes currently work). Both free for business to use.

More businesses need to update their websites to include their Eircode, we can agree on that.

GreenFolder2

The issue though still with eircode is it's entirely virtual world stuff.

There's nothing to help you understand where things actually are in relation to other things unless you haul up a digital map every time.

That's where some kind of on-going logical address rationalisation should be happening, especially with new buildings and businesses.

Individual homes are only a small % of deliveries / visits that actually cause serious problems and in most cases they can be looked up if necessary on a on-by-one basis.

The biggest issue I encounter is stuff that should be very easy to find in business parks, retail parks, shopping centres, industrial estates etc etc.

That's where I think we should start with some kind of making things more logical. It shouldn't cost anything as it's int the those places' interest to put in the ground work with signage and building labels. Local authorities just need to provide a format for those places to use.

Also in urban areas, they really do need to fix the numbering issues.

I still get a % of missing mail due to changes in postman on a regular basis and our area is a dense population with house names in an urban area, which is just stupid. So, when the postal delivery person changes, the new one can't find anything without learning the whole route every time. So, stuff gets delayed / goes missing. Eircode can't solve that as the postman doesn't look up every letter. Its only useful for sorting to his/her particular route.

Basically anytime we get a postman being off sick, or something happens that a temporary postman is on the route I can nearly guarantee that a % of my mail will go astray.

PDVerse

GreenFolder2 wrote: »

The issue though still with eircode is it's entirely virtual world stuff.

There's nothing to help you understand where things actually are in relation to other things unless you haul up a digital map every time.

That's where some kind of on-going logical address rationalisation should be happening, especially with new buildings and businesses.

Yes, it does require a smartphone.

Eircode doesn't prevent the address management overhaul you've suggested, in fact it is much easier to implement now that Eircode has been introduced.

GreenFolder2

I'm not saying that Eircode isn't useful. I'm just saying it's far from a complete solution to chaotic addressing.

LeinsterDub

GreenFolder2 wrote: »

I literally cannot find businesses here a lot of the time without Google map searches and GPS look ups of all sorts.

Of all sorts? You go to the eircode site and stick in the eircode or even Google maps. The addressing issue is unfixable. People will and do use whatever address suits them and short of refusing to deliver incorrectly addressed mail you've no way of forcing people to comply.

LeinsterDub

GreenFolder2 wrote: »

That gives you pin point accuracy and an ability to find things without having to go mad looking them up on GPS devices.

And by going mad you mean 4 seconds of effort?

sondagefaux

Great. So now we have yet more posters banging on about how every Irish address should conform to some largely imaginary norm that they have invented in their heads, despite the fact that making every Irish address have a street number/street name would cost a bloody fortune and take years to implement. Their chief objections to the Irish system of addresses? Aesthetic reasons. Get over it and use Eircodes. They precisely locate the physical location of every single postal address location in Ireland.

GreenFolder2

Aesthetics like not being able to find anything due to an inability to provide meaninful addresses.

You could cut the tension and rattiness on this thread with a knife.

I have never encountered so much passion about something as dull as postal codes!

sondagefaux

GreenFolder2 wrote: »

Aesthetics like not being able to find anything due to an inability to provide meaninful addresses.

You could cut the tension and rattiness on this thread with a knife.

I have never encountered so much passion about something as dull as postal codes!

Why can't you find an address? Stick in an Eircode and away you go - piece of p ss...
Why do you think that having 'logical' addresses would make it easier to find a place?
Does knowing that a house is located at 15 Any Street, Big Town, Co. Somewhere make it easy to find without looking up a map (unless you've got prior knowledge of the location)?
If you've never heard of Co. Somewhere, let alone Big Town or Any Street in said town, how would you know how to get there from your location without checking some sort of map?

Sam Russell

Mod: Can we cut the rattiness and the uncalled for sniping.

This thread has wandered off implementation and back into bickering. Please desist from attacking posters.

GreenFolder2

sondagefaux wrote: »

Why can't you find an address? Stick in an Eircode and away you go - piece of p ss...
Why do you think that having 'logical' addresses would make it easier to find a place?
Does knowing that a house is located at 15 Any Street, Big Town, Co. Somewhere make it easy to find without looking up a map (unless you've got prior knowledge of the location)?
If you've never heard of Co. Somewhere, let alone Big Town or Any Street in said town, how would you know how to get there from your location without checking some sort of map?

Well, things like house numbers in urban areas, building numbers in commercial developments and so on are things that most of the world takes for granted.

In Ireland they're largely optional. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they're non-existent and sometimes they're an illogical kludge of randomness.

I don't really see what the big deal about expecting some of those things to be rationalised is?

Nor do I see why people are getting so angry about me simply saying that while eircode solves a problem, particularly in rural areas where you can't find individual one off houses.

It still doesn't solve the chaos of badly implemented urban and business park addressing.

Sam Russell

Mod: Can we leave discussion about Eircode design on that thread and not here.

This thread is about the implementation of Eircode.

MBSnr

^^^ He has a point. Lack of logical physical numbering and names are a problem.

I had to get some stuff delivered to my work from a supplier in Germany. It took 4 or 5 emails for me to convince them that we didn't have a building number, no road name and that the address is just
Small Company, Medium Sized Business Park, City, Eircode, Ireland.

I only added the Eircode to make it look more professional - as it'll get here without it.. I think we were their 1st Irish customer, so the address format really threw them....

GJG

MBSnr wrote: »

^^^ He has a point. Lack of logical physical numbering and names are a problem.

I had to get some stuff delivered to my work from a supplier in Germany. It took 4 or 5 emails for me to convince them that we didn't have a building number, no road name and that the address is just
Small Company, Medium Sized Business Park, City, Eircode, Ireland.

I only added the Eircode to make it look more professional - as it'll get here without it.. I think we were their 1st Irish customer, so the address format really threw them....

I agree he has a point that addresses a particular problem. The thing is that the problem is entirely separate to the implementation of Eircode, which is the topic of this thread.

The only relevance it has to the implementation of Eircode is concocting some sort of impossible-to-satisfy criteria and demanding, (as seen numerous times in this and related threads) that implementation of Eircode be postponed until after, or made redundant by, meeting that criteria. It is usually accompanied by some extravagant adjectives about how stuuuuupid Eircode/the government/Ireland is for not adopting their pet scheme.

I actually agree that regularising addresses and signposting would be a good idea; but I'm realistic about the impracticality of such a project, particularly when I see the uproar over the correct placing of one single signpost in Cork, sparking national newspaper headlines, vandalism of the sign, and accusations that its placement was equivalent to colonial oppression.

When I see that none of these demands were made before Eircode was on the scene, and that nobody has adequately explained how Eircode hinders them, yet they are being pushed by anti-Eircode obsessives, it seems clear to me that they are grasping around for any rational-sounding reasoning, because their opposition is either self-interest or just not rational.

sondagefaux

MBSnr wrote: »

^^^ He has a point. Lack of logical physical numbering and names are a problem.

I had to get some stuff delivered to my work from a supplier in Germany. It took 4 or 5 emails for me to convince them that we didn't have a building number, no road name and that the address is just
Small Company, Medium Sized Business Park, City, Eircode, Ireland.

I only added the Eircode to make it look more professional - as it'll get here without it.. I think we were their 1st Irish customer, so the address format really threw them....

Let's hope they don't have any customers in France. Here's the address of a former French supplier of mine:
Aromaroc, ZA Bellevue, 56700 Merlevenez

Check it on their website if you like: http://aromaroc.fr/

ZA = Zone d'Activit s or, roughly translated into English, Business Park.

So the address for Aromaroc is in the format: Small Company, Medium Sized Business Park, Postcode, Town, France.

Carawaystick

sondagefaux wrote: »

So the address for Aromaroc is in the format: Small Company, Medium Sized Business Park, Postcode, Town, France.

In fairness, the first 2 numbers of the postcode tell it's in Dept of Moribihan ...

plodder

I have a letter to post to the HSE today which has three lines of address before the road, then another three lines of address. My own home address is four words, (five if you include the country). I quite like that quirkiness, and Eircode is a pragmatic way of dealing with it. But, that's off topic ....

Get over it and use Eircodes. They precisely locate the physical location of every single postal address location in Ireland.

That seems to be all a lot of people care about, and fair enough, but I think we're seeing some of the limitations as it gets implemented in other domains like statistics now. Small areas would have been ideal for house price statistics. Routing keys are a mixed bag - varying from moderately useful (in the east of country), to less useful (in the West), to (currently) useless in a few cases.

sondagefaux

Carawaystick wrote: »

sondagefaux wrote: »

So the address for Aromaroc is in the format: Small Company, Medium Sized Business Park, Postcode, Town, France.

In fairness, the first 2 numbers of the postcode tell it's in Dept of Moribihan ...

A French Departement is roughly the equivalent of an Irish county...