Thursday, February 03, 2011

Northern Ireland postcode data

The OS Code-Point Open dataset is great, except for a few omissions. It doesn’t include data for Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands. It turns out that the Northern Irish postcode data can be found here. Unfortunately that data is in ESRI and MapInfo formats, which I’m not sure how to read. Fortunately Jamie Thompson has converted it to CSV, which is a little easier to deal with.

From that CSV file, it’s quite simple to import the data into SQL Server or MySql using code slightly modified from my Code-Point examples (SQL Server here and MySql here). The only thing to note is that the CSV file uses Irish grid references rather than OS grid references.

Now to figure out where to get hold of the Isle of Man and Channel Islands data…

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What do we need to do to NI grid refs to be able to use the same transformation as OS refs?

Doogal said...

The easiest way is to grab the postcode data from my website http://www.doogal.co.uk/AdministrativeAreas.php. But if you want to do it yourself, you could use my .NET coordinates library http://www.doogal.co.uk/dotnetcoords.php