Australia Post provide a nice convenient CSV of all of their postcode data, and then proceed to make the license quite prohibitive.
Commercial use? No. Open source modification? No. Redistribution? Nope.
This is really annoying, but thankfully there’s another option. For your bookmarking pleasure, enter https://github.com/joahua/AusPostcode. It’s a CC-BY licensed version of suburb/postcode data in both CSV and JSON formats (feel free to fork and submit a pull request if you’ve got others) based on Australian census data that’s much more permissively licensed.
Happy free/open-source postcoding!
Awesome looks useful, in fact I will probably steal it :o
For such a large dataset I would probably store it in a database.
Yeah DB’s probably good but a lot of people would possibly store it in a table mixed with other stuff. I figured between CSV and JSON there’s enough easy formatted flexibility that most DBs can manage a fairly painless import for whatever they need it for.
Also JSON’s a good way to consume data/setup if you’re writing open source software. My reading suggests CC is GPL incompatible (so you can’t re-distribute this with GPL software), but there’s no reason you can’t distribute software that programatically grabs a copy from GitHub on install and adds it to DB tables!
Also running random SQL off the Internet is bad practice. Kinda like that new trend of just running “curl example.org/installscript” to setup CoolNewSoftware. WTF, no, that’s a really bad idea!!
Great work. I was just looking at the license and was amazed how restricted it is.
I’ve tweeted to @auspost to try and get a conversation going but until then your work here looks very nice.
Can you add to you github project the code you used to extract the data so we can re-update the data as it updates in future?