[CivicAccess-discuss] UK companies trying to 'Free the Postal Code"

[Daniel Haran]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Russell McOrmond<russell at flora.ca> wrote:
>   I'm wondering if anyone has got anywhere with discussing this with
> Canada Post.
....
>   We could derive the same data by taking electoral district maps which
> are already publicly available
> http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/geogratis/en/option/select.do?id=1169 , and
> correlate them with postal code maps if they were made available.  I could
> immagine the PostGIS query to do this (New things to learn), but don't
> have the postal code vector file.

Canada Post has an exclusive, multi-year deal with a big GIS co (ESRI,
if I recall), so they wouldn't let you create derivatives from them.

I got shapefiles for the forward sortation areas, and it was obvious
from the results that they didn't match the Stats Can data.

This whole thing's crazy.

Cheers,

d.

PS: if anyone wants an up to date postal code => electoral district
data, let me know and I'll re-run my scripts.