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Converting Irish street names to coordinates – Spatial Ireland

Matthew Sammon writes about using John Handelaar’s service for converting Irish street names to coordinates. He has very good points, but a few provisos:

It is only half true to say that Geodirectory covers every postal address in Ireland and links it to a coordinate. In fact, it links every inhabited building in Ireland, which is not quite the same thing. 40 percent of these buildings have non-unique addresses, i.e., they don’t even have an address of their own.

The biggest issue with Handelaar’s address-mangler is that such a large proportion of houses in Ireland are not on a named street. They are addressed relative to townlands. This isn’t purely a content issue, it’s an issue about the structure of geographical information in Ireland.

One other thing: there is no guarantee of uniqueness of streetnames within Dublin postcodes. For example, there are two Pembroke Cottages within Dublin 4 (Ringsend and Donnybrook). There are two James’s Places in Dublin 2 (one is off Baggot St., the other is a new building on the quays.)

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  1. > two Pembroke Cottages within
    > Dublin 4 (Ringsend and Donnybrook).

    Yes, and I know of an unfortunate householder who scheduled some work for the front of their house while residing abroad, only to return home and discover that, instead of his house in Ringsend, the bullder had fixed and painted a lucky stranger’s house in Donnybrook.

    One more reason to introduce postcodes . . .