Phil Gyford

UpMyStreet is already geo-encoded in a way of course, as almost every page contains specific information about the user’s postcode. However we’ve now linked things together using latitude and longitude in three ways:

• Every postcode-related page contains GeoURL metatags (discussed here a while back) which feature the location’s latitude and longitude.
• Every page can be accessed not just by postcode or town name but now also by latitude and longitude.
• There is a new page that can be used to convert between postcodes/towns and latitude and longitude.

You may wonder why. And that’s a good question. I’m certainly not going to register all 1.7 million UK locations with GeoURL.org. But I thought this might be useful stuff; there might be someone who can do something useful with these hooks into UpMyStreet’s pages, hooks that are more open than the obscure world of UK postcodes. It is, as the converter page says, still kind of beta, and I’d welcome any comments on errors, or, even better, thoughts on what could be done with all this, or what you’d like to do.

If you’re interested, the Geography::NationalGrid Perl modules may be useful to you, and the fascinating Ordnance Survey Guide to Coordinate Systems in Great Britain, in HTML or PDF.