London, 2 November 2010

The Ordnance Survey, as they announce in the OS Weblog, has taken another major step in Linked Data last week. In a milestone release all UK postcodes are now available as URI's (unique resource identifiers, akin to an URL) and linked to the URI's for administrative regions. The latter was a first linked data release earlier this year which gave all administrative an URI and description in terms of its name and the spatial relationships to other regions.

"This offers great potential to data publishers. By linking to identifiers for places and postcodes in your data you can enrich the information you hold. Imagine you have a list of schools and their postcodes. By connecting to the URIs for those postcodes you have a whole new way to view and analyse your data. Through the link to the postcode you now know the ward, district and county those schools are in. This is a very simple example of how merging two sets of linked data can deliver benefits."

Ordnance Survey Research Department is looking forward to increased availability and use of linked data. And they assume that location will be a major factor in Linked Data: "As more data is published the opportunity to create interesting applications based on combinations of these datasets grows. We suspect location will create a key information hub for many of these and applications…imagine the possibilities!"