1. It is true that constituency borders for european and local elections are revised every ten years or so. However, The electoral districts (of which the constituencies are made up) change very infrequently and in a very controlled way. The electoral districts system (previously called District Electoral Divisions and Wards) have been in use for more than one-and a-half-centuries, and some of them are still the same as the originals. They have to be kept the same as much as possible in order to allow for meaningful comparisions between censuses.

2. The answer for institutions, buildings or companies that receive large amounts of mail would be to assign their own streetcode to them. This would allow the mail to be further divided within the building.

3. Backwards compatibility with Geodirectory is not as difficult as you might imagine, because Geodirectory provides a very flexible and expandable schema. Geodirectory is partly based on imports from the electoral register database. Once the codes are added to the electoral register, the Geodirectory can be automatically updated.

There’s more detail in the full paper. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll email you a copy.

Very interesting system. It’s good that we’ll have such a thing in Ireland soon enough hopefully.

I think the US system has a nifty feature built into it, that allows for an easy way to calculate distances, something like that would be very useful. The amount of websites in the states that have “find your nearest store” type things is amazing, and very very useful.

Your top/left system doesn’t have that feature naturally, and would need some sort of lookup table.

Also, when looking at the number system did you just choose to ignore Northern Ireland, or did you leave a possible gap in numbers there?

http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/zipdecode/

go on, try me, I’m 92612

–j.

Just had a look at the powerpoint slides. Looks like a very good model. Here’s a point you might like to incorporate.

Since you are using the counties as the basis of the numerical codes, you should use distinct codes for the five cities – Dublin, Cork, Galway, Waterford and Limerick – that are independent administrative entities with the same status as Counties (e.g. Galway City is officially located *beside* Galway County, not *within* Galway County).

Michael