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Integration of Germany's postal code areas into WhosOnFirst data #197

Open dawidl11 opened 1 year ago

dawidl11 commented 1 year ago

Hi all, I am using WhosOnFirst data for my geocoding Pelias instance:

My question: Is there any way to know if you are planning to add the German postal code areas to the WhosOnFirst data as well? If yes, then when should it be done?

Many thanks in advance for the answers! Dawid

nvkelso commented 1 year ago

@dawidl11 Thanks for your question!

Postal code data is not generally as available as open data as the rest of the "administrative" data in Who's On First. We have imported it for a few countries also including the United Kingdom.

If you know of an open data source for Germany postal codes than we can work with you to import it.

Do you know of a good source?

dawidl11 commented 1 year ago

Thanks for your quick reply. I do know this data source: https://opendata-esri-de.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/5b203df4357844c8a6715d7d411a8341_0/explore? . Would it be possible to import this data into WhosOnFirst?

nvkelso commented 1 year ago

The license on that page in German:

Die Daten stehen unter der Open Database Licence frei zur Verfügung. Quelle der Rohdaten: © OpenStreetMap contributors Einwohnerzahlen als Berechnungsgrundlage © Statistische Ämter des Bundes und der Länder

Translated using Google translate:

The data is freely available under the Open Database License. Raw data source: © OpenStreetMap contributors Population figures as a basis for calculation © Federal and state statistical offices

Elsewhere on the site it says: The 5-digit postal code areas come from OpenStreetMap and are enriched with the EWZ attributes (census 2011) and AGS, district, municipality or city affiliation in order to optimize the usage and analysis options.

Generally OpenStreetMap is not an allowlisted source for Who's On First. But this license doesn't totally make sense to me, @stepps00 can you dig into it a bit more, please? If we follow the thread far enough upstream OSM may list out the open data source they used to import the data. (And it's unusual to see postalcode data in OSM at all in my experience.)

stepps00 commented 1 year ago

So it looks like the postalcode data on the ESRI site does come directly from OSM.

Looking at OSM change history on some of the postalcode features, it looks like those features were imported from this now defunct site: https://arnulf.us/PLZ

I also found this page which gives more context to the German postalcode data in OSM: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue/Postleitzahlen_Deutschland_2010

I've reviewed a few other sites with postalcode data online, but those all point back to the same data (example one, example two).

Who's On First would require a different data source for German postalcodes.. @dawidl11 do you happen to have another source for this data?

dawidl11 commented 1 year ago

Thank you for your research on this. Unfortunately, I have no other source for the postal code areas for now. But I will still do a little research. If I do find something, I will let you know.