Rapid Addressing
Put in the postcode - Get the address
Address Management
Rapid addressing; postcode identification and more
Mailing List Generation
Build mailing lists for bulk mailing for free
Gazetteer
A list of all towns and villages in the UK,
with their size and position
Where's My Nearest?
Find the local branches of a business
Map Referencing
Pinpoint the map position of a postcode
Web Use
Get a visitor's address from their postcode -
save time and eliminate mistakes.
Map Referencing
Map referencing, or more generally geo-referencing, is finding an (x, y) position or longitude/latitude pair for a point. As far as addressing data is concerned, this can be done at several levels.
Premise level:
The most detailed level is to find the (x, y) coordinate of a single house or other building. As far as is known, the only product that provides this is Address-Point which is produced by the Ordnance Survey and resold as part of the National Land and Property Gazetteer. Arc en Ciel does not resell this product, but if you need this level of accuracy you can find more details at: www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/addresspoint.
Postcode level:
On average, a postcode covers 12 premises. A map reference for a postcode is therefore almost certainly within a hundred metres of any particular house, which is adequate for many applications.
Above: Example of Postcode level referencing.
Arc en Ciel provides Ordnance Survey data which includes a map reference for every postcode, accurate to +/- 1 metre. This is supplied with the Address and Address+ products, but is normally used by developers through the API.
A variation on postcode-level geo-referencing is to start with a position and find an address. For example, a GPS device in a vehicle can get a longitude/latitude as it moves along and it might be useful to know the names of the streets it passes through. As part of its Developers API Arc en Ciel provides a function CodesInRadius which finds the postcodes within a given radius of a point. The nearest postcode can be found and used to generate the address.
Area/District level
A postcode "Area" is the first one or two letters. For example "CB". A District is the whole of the first half
of the postcode, such as "CB11".
We provide a component called AddressLocate to give grid references for all Areas and Districts. AddressLocate is not used on the desktop, but forms part of our Developers API.
The average distance across a District is +/- 2.7 km (1.7 miles). This is adequate accuracy for applications where a car or van is involved and a kilometre or two more or less is not critical. In built-up areas Districts are much smaller than in rural areas so giving increased accuracy where it is most useful.