Open Addresses

Addresses are part of our everyday lives: they pinpoint where we live, work and visit and connect us to local communities and services we rely on. However, address services available today can be expensive to use: many organisations, particularly smaller ones, cannot afford them. And even when they can afford to access them, restrictive terms limit what organisations can do with them. Meanwhile the quality is inconsistent, it can take months to make new addresses visible leaving the people who live or work there unable to get the services they need.

The Open Addresses project aims to leverage social machines to make locating, entering and accessing addresses simpler and better. Together with a growing network of contributors this project is building the UK’s first free and open address list: a list that is available for anyone to access, use and share as open data. In line with our vision of making data open and transparent, the project will track where address data comes from and publish a calculated level of confidence for each address so others can make informed decisions about the addresses they choose to use.

The Open Addresses project is a collaboration with the Open Data Institute.