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The Non Golden Rules of Geo (Redux)

Gary — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 08:16:52 +0000

Back when I used to work for Yahoo! I wrote a lot of posts for the Geo Technologies blog; for reasons partially explained in my last post, that blog is now offline, presumed dead. But one post that seems to keep catching people’s imagination is the one in which I, somewhat tongue in cheek, codified the Six Non Golden Rules Of Geo. Much to my satisfaction, it keeps getting mentioned, although the full original post is inaccessible, as is the rest of that blog. Nate Kelso reproduced part of it, as did John Goodwin but until earlier today I’d not been able to find the full post.

Step forward the aforementioned John Goodwin who, with a bit of internet detective work, managed to find a mirror of the post. While I much prefer to link to blog posts rather than reproduce them in full, in this case I’m plagiarising myself and making an exception on the ground of inaccessibility, and have mirrored the post in full here. It’s worth mentioning that this post was originally written in February of 2009, when I was still working for Yahoo! so it’s a little out of date and was originally posted as …

UK Addressing, The Non Golden Rules of Geo or Help! My County Doesn’t Exist

George Bernard Shaw once said the golden rule is that there are no golden rules and at Geo Technologies we understand that there is no one golden rule for geo and so we try to capture and express the world’s geography as it is used and called by the world’s people. Despite the pronouncement on golden rules, a significant proportion of the conversations we have with people about geo lend themselves to the Six Non Golden Rules of Geo, namely that:

Any attempt to codify a series of geo rules into a formal, one size fits all, taxonomy will fail due to Rule 2.
Geo is bizarre, odd, eclectic and utterly human.
People will in the main agree with Rule 1 with the exception of the rules governing their own region, area or country, which they will think are perfectly logical.
People will, in the main, think that postal, administrative and colloquial hiearachies are one and the same thing and will overlap.
Taking Rule 4 into account, they will then attempt to codify a one size fits all geo taxonomy.
There is no Rule 6, see Rule 1.

I codified these rules after a conversation last week, via Twitter and Yahoo! Messenger, with Andrew Woods, a US based developer who was, understandably, confused by the vagaries of the how addresses work in the UK. Andrew’s blog contains the full context but it can be distilled into three key questions:

If the country is The United Kingdom, how come the ISO 3166-2 code is GB?
If the country is The United Kingdom, is England a country?
If England is a country, do I use it in an address?

As a US developer, Andrew is naturally fluent with the US style of addressing, with all of its’ localised and regional exceptions. This is a good example of both Rules 3 and 4 in the real world; most people in the US will use number, street, city, State and ZIP for specifying an address. But how does this transfer to the UK? What’s the equivalent of a State … England, Scotland or Wales? Let’s try to answer some of these problems:

If the country is The United Kingdom, how come the ISO 3166-2 code is GB?

The UK’s full name is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and although the United Kingdom and Great Britain are used interchangeably, Great Britain really refers to England, Scotland and Wales. At the time of writing, both GB and UK are formal ISO 3166-2 codes for the United Kingdom with GB being the assigned code for Great Britain and UK being exceptionally reserved by the United Kingdom.

If the country is The United Kingdom, is England a country?

To be formal and precise, the United Kingdom is a unitary state, not a country, with four “member” countries; England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

If England is a country, do I use it in an address?

Normally, no. A full UK address consists of the following:

The addressee’s name, if known or applicable
The company or organisation, if known or applicable
The building name; optional if the building has a number
The number of the building and the name of the street
The locality name;optional
The Post Town
The county; optional if a Post Town and Postcode are supplied
The Postcode

… for example, take our office address of Yahoo! Geo Technologies, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8AD. This address has no building name, a building number and street, no locality name, a Post Town, no county as we have a Post Town and a Post Code, and a Post Code.

Which brings me neatly to another example of Rule 4 and the missing county of this post’s title. The UK’s postal hierarchy and administrative hierarchy are not the same. Since 1996 the first half of a UK postcode, known as the outward code, has been used to help in the sorting of mail but prior to this a set of postal counties were used as part of addresses and these frequently do not match the current set of administrative counties. For example, the county of Middlesex was formally abolished in 1965 with the majority of the county becoming part of Greater London. Despite this and despite the 1996 postcode changes, Middlesex lives on as a postal county and as informal area name with the side effect that it is still possible to send mail, and have it delivered, to places in a county which hasn’t existed for over 40 years.

Oh, and Yahoo! GeoPlanet, naturally, recognises Middlesex and correctly identifies it as a Historical County.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Is it Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the British Isles or what exactly?

Gary — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:11:32 +0000

In February 2009 I wrote a post for the Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog about how people outside of the United Kingdom are sometimes confused by the vagaries of how to correctly write street addresses in the UK and if the United Kingdom is a country and if England is a country then how can England be part of the United Kingdom. Some pointed comments to the original post ensued from the likes of Ed Parsons from Google and Andrew Larcombe from the British Computer Society’s Geospatial Specialist Group.

And so almost a year later I went back and started to research exactly how the United Kingdom, Great Britain and the British Isles are actually put together. It was an educational journey because, even with being born and bred in London, it turned out that even I didn’t fully understand this subject. So I tried to codify it with a variation on The Great British Venn Diagram, which looks something like this:

Let’s start with the easy bit. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries at an administrative level; they’re shown in yellow on the diagram above.

Great Britain, so named as to distinguish itself from Brittany, is a geographic island which comprises the countries of England, Scotland and Wales.

The United Kingdom is a sovereign state, shown in red, which comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Ireland, also a geographic island, contains the administrative country of Northern Ireland and the sovereign state of the Republic of Ireland or Eire.

So far so good, but what about the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands? Both of these are not part of the United Kingdom, instead they are both Crown Dependencies, shown in purple, and are part of a federacy with the United Kingdom. And a federacy? That’s a type of government where one or more of the member administrative units have more independence than the majority of the member administrative units.

Finally, there’s everything else; those remnants of the British Empire scattered across the globe which enjoy the slightly nondescript appellation of British Overseas Territories (or British Dependent Territories prior to 2002 or Crown Colonies prior to 1981).

To be more precise, these are parts of the British Empire that did not gain independence and that the United Kingdom asserts sovereignty over. They take in Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Of course not everyone agrees with these definitions …

Written and posted from the Kempinski Hotel Bristol in Berlin (52.5052405, 13.3280218)

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An Open Letter to Asda and Walmart

Gary — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:08:46 +0000

This is an open letter to Andy Bond, Chief Executive of Asda and to Mike Duke, CEO of Wal-Mart.

As a British citizen who travels a lot in the US I understand that the “customer service” ethos which is so prevalent in the US doesn’t travel or translate particularly well in the UK. I also understand that it’s almost naive to expect that since Asda was taken over by Wal-Mart in 1999 any type of US values would transfer to the UK arm. I also understand that the UK supermarket business is highly competitive and that through Asda, Wal-Mart is competing head-to-head with Tesco, Morrison’s and Sainsbury’s. I understand and accept all of this.

What I do not understand and what I do not accept is the sheer bloody-mindedness and rudeness of your staff, especially those of your online retailer business.

Let me explain.

As a family we tried out Asda, as their prices are extremely competitive compared to those of their competitors, so on the 19th of October we booked a delivery slot for an online shop; the order wasn’t particularly large or complex but it was still in excess of £100.00. The only delivery slot available was from 8.00 PM to 10.00 PM the following day.

October 20th. 10.05 PM. No shopping. So I look online for some insight.

“We know how important it is that we deliver on time but occasionally we can run into difficulties. In the unlikely event that we will be late, we’ll always try to let you know.“

I liked the answer to the question “My delivery hasn’t arrived yet?” … “If your shopping hasn’t arrived by the end of your delivery slot, please call our Helpline on 0844 8733333 (calls will be charged at a local rate, lines are open 8am-10pm, 7 days a week.)“.

Unless, of course, your shopping is due to arrive at 10.00 PM in which case if there is a problem, anyone at Asda has gone home for the night. But not my delivery driver it would seem, who rings me at 10.20 to tell me “we’re running slightly late” and that “your shopping will be there at 35 past latest“.

October 20th. 10.40 PM. No shopping.

October 20th. 10.45 PM. Shopping arrives with a giggle and a laugh; “We’re running a bit late tonight (hee hee hee)“. No apology, no contrition, no final bill so I know how much we’ve actually spent, it all seems one great big joke. Apart from the point where they knocked on the front door so hard it managed to wake both of my children up. A great joke, hilarious; only I’m the only one who doesn’t seem to find this particularly amusing.

So I look at my confirmation email … “If you have any queries about ASDA Online Shopping you can contact us on 0844 8733333“. Ah yes, this would be the helpline that closed at 10.00 PM.

So the following day at around 9.30 AM, we ring customer service; they’re open now. They promise to ring the store and the store manager would call us.

October 21st. 2.00 PM. No call. So we hold while customer services rings the store; the store manager “isn’t available and will call us back“.

October 21st. 5.00 PM. No call. So we call customer services who have, miraculously, been in touch with the store. They agree that this is appalling customer service, so appalling that as a token of their esteem they offer “Free delivery of your next order“. This assumes there will be a next order and it works out at the grand total of £4.25. Obviously not that appalling so we say that it’s not good enough.

Asda’s second, and final as it turns out, offer? £10.00 in e-vouchers, which again assumes that there will be a next order and which, by the way, needs to be redeemed in 2 months otherwise they’re invalidated. Still not that appalling so we say that it’s not good enough. So we’re put on hold … permanently as the call isn’t picked up again and after another 15 minutes we hang up in sheer frustration.

As an organisation, Asda may have had a consumer spend of almost £3.5B and a market share of 17% as of August 2008 but as of October 2009 my wallet won’t be contributing to that spend and Asda’s market share just dropped by one household’s worth, which has gone back to one of their rivals.

Photo credits: itslefty, juliebee and Tico on Flickr

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When a Middle Initial Has Transatlantic Significance

Gary — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 14:47:14 +0000

Mr. Iain Banks is a Scottish author with two personas. As Iain Banks he writes mainstream, if slightly edgy, novels. As Iain M. Banks he writes science fiction novels, including the Culture series, which deals with a vast and sprawling interstellar utopian civilization. The M is important here. Without it you know you’re getting a mainstream story. With it, you know you’re getting sci-fi. But not in the USA apparently.

While wandering around Newark Liberty airport in New Jersey, I came across what I thought was a new Iain M Bank novel in the Borders concession. So, M. Sci-fi. It even has the by now standard endorsement from William Gibson telling us that this is “science fiction of a peculiary gnarly energy and elegance“.

So, M. Sci-fi. Right? Apparently not quite.

Paul Miller tells me on Twitter that in the UK this is an Iain Banks novel. No M. Not sci-fi. A quick cross check between Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk shows that Paul’s right. So what’s going on here? I’ll have to read the book to try and work out what’s happening but for now at least, it appears that for Iain Banks’ middle initial it’s a case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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Deliciousness: more bacon, UK geek location, your PIN number, birds tweeting, Ohio as a piano, OMG and WTF and UNIX turns 40.

Gary — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:08:42 +0000

A semi regular, almost weekly, trawl through the latest stuff on the interwebs bookmarked on Delicious.

This fad for all things bacon flavoured is getting out of hand; a few weeks back it was bacon flavoured vodka and now you can get bacon flavoured lip balm.
There’s lots of geeks in the United Kingdom; now you can know where they are. I might be there as well.
Someone posted the PIN number from your credit or debit card onto the interwebs.
Twitter’s popular these days; even the birds in the trees are RT’ing.
If Ohio was a piano, ever wondered how it’d sound? Possibly the weirdest geo and mapping visualization. Ever.
There’s a spectrum from OMG to WTF, pasing through”I get it”, “that’s strange” and “I don’t get it” along the way.
And finally, UNIX turned 40. It’s still younger than me though.