NAME

Geo::UK::Postcode::Manual::GeoLocation

DESCRIPTION

Short guide to finding locations of UK postcodes, using the freely available Code-Point Open data available from the Ordnance Survey.

EXAMPLE PROCESS

Obtaining data

Data is available in CSV format from Ordnance Survey. The free located postcodes data is called 'Code-Point Open'.

Follow the steps on the site to be emailed a download link for a ZIP file (~15MB).

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/code-point-open.html

The licence the data is provided under is http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/licensing/using-creating-data-with-os-products/os-opendata.html

Importing the data

Geo::UK::Postcode::CodePointOpen provides a read_iterator() method to iterate through the CSV data files, returning a hashref for each postcode.

This data can then be inserted as a row into a data store.

Example database MySQL table definition:

    CREATE TABLE `gb_postcodes` (
      `outcode` char(4) NOT NULL,
      `incode` char(3) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
      `latitude` decimal(7,5) DEFAULT NULL,
      `longitude` decimal(7,5) DEFAULT NULL,
      PRIMARY KEY (`outcode`,`incode`)
    ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

For simple lookups, one could alternatively use a key/value store - concatenate the outcode and incode (with a separator) into the key, and the latitude and longitude (again with a separator) into the value.