Post: 27 March 2013
Update Apr 23: cancellation of Pinpoint has now also been confirmed on the Royal Mail website.
According to a post on the Allies Computing website, Royal Mail have confirmed they will not proceed with their controversial Pinpoint positional data capture project.
Andrea Martin, Managing Director of Data Services for Royal Mail, is quoted:
“Royal Mail announced in the summer of 2012 a pilot initiative in East Anglia to map the co-ordinates of home and business. The pilot explored the potential for Royal Mail to support the location-based information marketplace. Following the completion and full review of the pilot, we have decided not to progress the initiative.”
I’ve posted previously about the origins and progress of the Pinpoint project. If successful Pinpoint would have added geographic coordinates to Royal Mail’s existing Postcode Address File (PAF) dataset.
It’s currently unclear why Pinpoint has been cancelled, though Royal Mail’s attempt to enter the market for geocoded address data had raised eyebrows within Britain’s geographic information community.
Pinpoint would have provided competition for Ordnance Survey’s well-regarded but rather pricey AddressBase products. However the future shape of the address data market is uncertain, with Royal Mail privatisation on the cards and both Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey under pressure to unlock their address data assets as part of an “open data” National Address Dataset.
Royal Mail had reportedly allocated an investment of £10 million or more to the Pinpoint initiative.