ukoda wrote: » So then Royal Mail must make preciously zero income from their licenced products. Like why would anyone pay for it so? Why do they even have a product you licence. The frustrating part is how simplistic you try to make it.
plodder wrote: » The same companies will license the PAF for different things like address validation. But, not all usages of a postcode require address validation. So, why should you have to license something you don't want or need? The whole point is not aimed at big commercial entities like insurance companies clearly. It's more for small businesses (who in the UK don't likely license the PAF) or voluntary organisations etc.
plodder wrote: » .........a) Eircodes are unique per property b) they are random meaning the patterns aren't discernible without having the database But you can do it in the UK without having to license anything. You don't need to know the locations or anything else about the postcodes. you said it yourself - Eircodes identify individual properties - 21st century stuff that plodder wrote: » You can glean all of this from the structure of the code and the codes themselves. how quaint, we have smartphones and nice things here: The figures indicate that we use our smartphones for internet activity more than any other western country........ The proportion of web traffic on phones here is almost a third higher than the European average.It is also a quarter higher than in the UK. It is even higher than mobile-mad Finland, home of Nokia and a birthplace of smartphones.https://bit.ly/1NVTJN2 Anyway back to future implemetation by An Post and others land Revenue.ie finding shadowy landlords : In the first four months of this year the rental sector (€10 million) was responsible for the biggest source of unpaid tax,The availability of new sources of data, such as the property tax register and the home renovation incentive scheme, is helping Revenue to target those most likely to have tax liabilities.http://www.irishtimes.com/business/revenue-targets-rental-sector-as-part-of-crackdown-1.2316446
plodder wrote: » You can glean all of this from the structure of the code and the codes themselves.
The figures indicate that we use our smartphones for internet activity more than any other western country........ The proportion of web traffic on phones here is almost a third higher than the European average.It is also a quarter higher than in the UK. It is even higher than mobile-mad Finland, home of Nokia and a birthplace of smartphones.https://bit.ly/1NVTJN2
In the first four months of this year the rental sector (€10 million) was responsible for the biggest source of unpaid tax,The availability of new sources of data, such as the property tax register and the home renovation incentive scheme, is helping Revenue to target those most likely to have tax liabilities.http://www.irishtimes.com/business/revenue-targets-rental-sector-as-part-of-crackdown-1.2316446
plodder wrote: » This is what's so frustrating about this, as I've explained this several times before. A UK insurance company can build up a database of its own customers' postcodes without having to license anything. I really mean nothing at all. Nothing whatsoever, of any description. You do not have to pay anyone to keep a list of postcodes. Then the company gets claims in the door. If a large pattern of claims emerge from the same postcode, or from higher level areas, these can be assessed and risk levels established for setting future premiums. You can't do this with Eircode without licensing the ECAD (or ECAF) because :- a) Eircodes are unique per property b) they are random meaning the patterns aren't discernible without having the database But you can do it in the UK without having to license anything. You don't need to know the locations or anything else about the postcodes. You can glean all of this from the structure of the code and the codes themselves.
Does my automotive device support the new Eircode postal code system in Ireland? 08/27/2015 Garmin is aware of Ireland’s new postal code system, called Eircode. This system has not yet been incorporated into City Navigator mapping. We are working to establish a solution in order to provide the Eircode search capability in our devices. Eircodes are formatted and structured differently than postal codes in other countries. Garmin is collaborating with our map data provider to determine how we can best offer the use of Eircodes to our customers.
GJG wrote: » Plodder, I'm acknowledging that the scenario that you outline is correct, but I don't think that you are giving reasonable weight to how narrow the case you outline is, and how broad the implications for the system would be if you sacrificed other features to meet this very narrow requirement. First, the only advantage that the UK system has (as you see it) is grouping up to 26 properties in a cluster that is rational for post delivery, not necessarily anything else. There is nothing to stop Irish operators from collecting Eircodes in their own database too, just the clustering information isn't evident. Changing the Irish system to accommodate the subset of insurance companies that won't fork out a few grand to licence the database would mean that (be it with a sequential or hierarchical system) increasing proximity would mean increasing similarity of postcode, to the point that side-by-side addresses have identical postcodes as in the UK. To me, it is blindingly obvious that is a bad idea in a country with 40 per cent of addresses otherwise non-unique. The reasons have been thrashed out at great length on the other thread, I won't go through them again. Maybe you don't accept them, that's fine, but a decision had to be made and, to me, it would have been grossly perverse to make it any differently. But the bottom line is that it's not possible for a multi-use system to be optimised for all uses. Finding a single narrow example of a change that would suit one application is not proof of a mistake in the design.
Sam Russell wrote: » I was talking to a guy in An Post and I asked if they use Eircode. He said they were trialling the sorting bit but the random design meant the average postie would not be able to memorise all the codes and so would be useless for that. .......
Speeding charge dropped after court hears five people had same name as accused John Boyce says 22 families share his surname in single Donegal townland He told Judge Alan Mitchell there was an issue with letters sometimes getting mixed up in the area as there were 22 families with the same surname as him living in the same townland. To make matters even more complicated, up to five different people also had the same first name as him .http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/district-court/speeding-charge-dropped-after-court-hears-five-people-had-same-name-as-accused-1.2391779
plodder wrote: » I disagree and there is a simple explanation. Eircode could have been designed in such a way that it does everything that it does today, but with a hierarchical structure exposing small areas as part of the code.Please show me some use case that would not be covered by this. Any use case that does not suit the area structure directly provided by the code, does exactly what it has to do today with the ECAD/ECAF
Sam Russell wrote: » I also contacted Garmin and they said: From that, I think the collaboration is not with Captiva but Navteq, I presume.
GJG wrote: » The Eircode design has taken extraordinary steps to make sure that properties with similar addresses have starkly different Eircodes. A one- or even two-character differentiation just isn't enough in real-world settings where things get mumbled, mistaken or scribbled down. This covers all houses in the same street or townland, but also cases like having five Warrentowns (or similar) in Co Meath. Each address in all of them has a starkly different Eircode. It means that when a bank statement is sent out to J Murphy, Old Bog Road, it goes to the Johnny like it should, not Jimmy down the road a bit. If you genuinely can't see an advantage in that that outweighs the needs of an insurance company trying to re-invent the wheel on the cheap, then there is little more to say. We disagree.
Read what gctest50 says above and think which side of history you are on. Do you really think that all these computers and smartphone yokemebobs are just a passing fad?
Sam Russell wrote: » I was talking to a guy in An Post and I asked if they use Eircode. He said they were trialling the sorting bit but the random design meant the average postie would not be able to memorise all the codes and so would be useless for that. He also said a structured code would have been much better. I also contacted Garmin and they said: From that, I think the collaboration is not with Captiva but Navteq, I presume.
xband wrote: » From that I hear "weird, technically complex system in small country. "
plodder wrote: » I disagree and there is a simple explanation. Eircode could have been designed in such a way that it does everything that it does today, but with a hierarchical structure exposing small areas as part of the code. Please show me some use case that would not be covered by this. Any use case that does not suit the area structure directly provided by the code, does exactly what it has to do today with the ECAD/ECAF
xband wrote: » And the long list of companies posted are servicing mostly international customers. Eircode makes zero difference to them.
gctest50 wrote: » stop, ireland is all about the technologiez
gctest50 wrote: » no, my point was there are many tech-oriented companies here we are not backward here in ireland i can draw pictures if you want
xband wrote: » I'm glad you can draw pictures. It's an important skill to have! I'm not saying we're backward. You're the one who brought that up. We've produced an over complicated, weird postcode system that's not straight forward to implement as it isn't grid based or even geographically based really. Each code has a unique coordinate and they're not really structured much at all. It requires ongoing licensing and APIs to connect to databases etc etc What I'm saying is it's a small market and a lot of companies would have to consider whether the implementation cost is worth it. The fact that a lot of tech companies are here is totally irrelevant. Companies using this will be serving Irish customers.
BoatMad wrote: » The trend today with the availability of tech is not to create hierarchical " Human readable " coding structures, but to simply generate keys into a database which then when accessed returns all the necessary information,
this allows you to add and modify such information , the system is used extensively in things like barcode lookups. A barcode on the back of a product means absolutely nothing to you , but when linked to a database is a very powerful lookup device.
plodder wrote: » Oh, like Eircode? Barcodes themselves are designed so they can be read easily by laser scanners. That's a different issue really. But, the product/article numbers encoded in barcodes are hierarchical though. It would be fairly chaotic if they were random. So, I don't think hierarchical data is going anywhere really.
gctest50 wrote: » It'll be great for areas where you have 2 or more with the same name eg John Russell A23 XH56 and John Russell A23 DF45 and John Russell A23 U76 kind of thing would have prevented this : so .......... GoSafe need to start using it asap .
gctest50 wrote: » There isn't that much order to mobile phone numbers and we all get along fine with them, you could have 0871315466 and your wife could have 0838274222 & everyone that needs to know your numbers has them
plodder wrote: » True, but mobile phones numbers are attached to people who aren't tied to a particular location. I'm not sure how you would code them hierarchically or what benefit they would be. Postcodes are tied to fixed locations though.
ukoda wrote: » You asked them in Aug? It would be interesting to go back to them now and ask for an update? If you're so inclined, I'd be interested to see what they say
Sam Russell wrote: » I asked them the other day. They pointed me to a website that gave that response - not very active stance by them.
ukoda wrote: » Actually one of the benefits they claim in the eircode design is that the geo coordinates can change but the post code remains the same, so essentially you could "move" a postcodes location a few feet up the road or across the road or where ever and the postcode itself wouldn't have to change. Something that can't be done with a pure geo code as a geo code is completely tied to one exact location.Could be a useful feature in say a campus scenario where they move a department across the campus, it could in theory keep its postcode but the location would simply get updated on the database to new coordinates. Similarly if a company had a huge site and they moved their main entrance to say another road, the coordinates could be changed but again they wouldn't have the hassle of getting a new postcode like they would if we used Geo based ones.
Sam Russell wrote: » But Eircodes do not allow a translation from one address to a different one this you have stated many times - (I am not bothered to track down examples before you ask). You use an example of moving from one side of a site to another but what if you move from one side of town to the other? For example, if revenue moved income tax from Limerick to Sligo, then they would need a new Eircode. However, a geo-location code could allow non-geographic codes which do not have locations. [I know Eircode could too but they said they will not] Government, Eircom (eir) and ESB, etc would love these for handling regular post.
clewbays wrote: » Interesting analogy plodder. If I understand you correctly you are saying that traditional postcodes and landline numbers are both hierarchical but that mobile numbers and eircodes are not!
clewbays wrote: » That is the danger of a hierarchical eircode - you either make it longer to accommodate An Post sorting offices, small areas, and uniqueness or you risk future revisions to address new builds.
clewbays wrote: » Interesting analogy plodder. If I understand you correctly you are saying that traditional postcodes and landline numbers are both hierarchical but that mobile numbers and eircodes are not! Your argument reminds me of the relatively recent restructuring of landline phone numbers for some area codes to accommodate expansion - an extra digit was added. That is the danger of a hierarchical eircode - you either make it longer to accommodate An Post sorting offices, small areas, and uniqueness or you risk future revisions to address new builds.
