In ‘The Guardian’ (hard copy, at least) of yesterday, Wednesday 23 November 2005, section ‘Epublic’ was a report by Michael Cross ‘Make room in your little black book . . .’.
This featured the ongoing controversy about the OS, that has “announced plans to add millions of new items to its database of 27m properties around Britain to make it more useful for emergency crews and local authorities”, a proposed NSAI [= National Spatial Address Infrastructure] to be run (and Crown Copyrighted) by the OS, and the already existing NLPG [= National Land and Property Gazetteer].
The OS’s ‘MasterMap’ database already holds addresses – but not of the ‘Opwas’ [= Objects without postal addresses] such as public buildings or utility installations – and is trying to improve this by adding pub names, churches, and Welsh-language forms of similar ‘aliases’. The feature article is colour-illustrated by a public toilet at Portobello (the one in Edinburgh?). A situation of avoiding duplication of effort and money is currently that of ‘stalemate’.
Francis Herbert