[Phpwm] Cleaning up addresses

[Phil Beynon]

> Phil
>
> You have mentioned this project numerous times and I really
> struggle to see
> what is so complicated and time consuming about it as there are files
> available that list all UK postcodes with a centroid longitude
> and latitude
> value, which can be licensed for a few hundred pounds.
>
> A simple navigational algorithm "greater circle" allows you to calc the
> distance from postcode to postcode, a simple script can then be created
> which will span out from the source postcode on an expanding
> radius to find
> adjacent postcodes. Something which takes milliseconds on a normal machine
> with MySQL (I know from my benchmarking).
>
> Are you seriously saying you had a company employing four people
> doing data
> entry for something that can be done in a few hours work, with a suitable
> low cost data set?
>
> Or am I seriously missing what you have put together here?
>
> Dave

Hi Dave,

A few times, not numerous!
It didnt do anything with lat / long distances, distance never came into it
at all. Thats not what it was about at all, it was about the adjacency of
one postcode area to another.
I've never managed to find anyone who could provide that as a dataset, for
instance it could also span rivers where there was a bridge, or ferry routes
could be expanded to provide an adjacency (for instance from the Shetland
Islands to Aberdeen), so it could never get locked in anywhere - it will
always expand until it found the geographical location of the nearest
required resource that the searcher wanted. That info could then be passed
to say multimap.com if driving directions were required.

The company that I was working with, of which I was a director alongside
what I do at Infolink, had some "spare" employees who were tasked to do the
data entry. Unfortunately their core facilities management business failed
as a direct result of Rover going bust owing them a shed load of cash, which
despite everyones best efforts caused this project to fail as the two
companies were heavily intertwined and HSBC pulled the plug on him. Such is
life!

Phil