Glossary
Glossary Term | Definition |
---|---|
addressed premise | A permanent or non-permanent building structure with an address being a potential delivery point for Royal Mail. Examples include a house, a flat within a block of flats, a caravan site, or an organisation. |
building | A physical, walled structure connected to foundations that has, or will have, a roof. This includes buildings surveyed at foundation stage. |
CPLC (Code-Point location coordinate) | A National Grid reference for each postcode unit. It is a two-dimensional coordinate point to a resolution of 1 metre. Coordinates are attributed from GridLink using an accuracy hierarchy. |
Country code | The code used by the Office of National Statistics to indicate the country in which the Code-Point georeference lies. This has replaced the PAF update date field. |
Country Code | England: E92000001 Scotland: S92000003 Wales: W92000004 N Ireland: N92000002 |
Comma-separated values (CSV) | The CSV file format is commonly used to exchange data between different applications, for example, Microsoft Excel and Access. Being text files, CSV files can also be viewed in Notepad. |
delivery point | A Royal Mail-defined point to which mail is delivered. This may be a property (private address), organisation, mailbox, or even, very rarely, the name of an individual. |
GridLink | A joined-up Government initiative involving Royal Mail, the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS), Land & Property Services, and Ordnance Survey. |
inward code or incode | See postcode. |
matched address | An address resulting from a match between the OS MasterMap Topography Layer data and PAF, which has been allocated a coordinate position. |
National Grid | A unique referencing system that can be applied to all Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain (GB) at all scales. |
National Grid reference (NGref) | The National Grid provides a unique reference system that can be applied to all Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain. The map of Great Britain is covered by 100 km by 100 km grid squares. |
non-geographic postcodes | Special non-geographic postcodes are allocated to single organisations who receive an exceptionally large amount of mail. These are included in Code-Point Open. |
outward code or outcode | See postcode. |
Postcode Address File (PAF) | PAF now contains the postal addresses and postcodes of approximately 28 million delivery points in Great Britain. |
Postal Address Location Feed (PALF) | The PAL Feed is provided to Ordnance Survey from GeoPlace, who have geocoded the PAF feed from Royal Mail, using source coordinates from Local Authorities in England, Wales, and Scotland. |
positional quality indicator (PQI) | The positional quality indicator is a flag used to indicate the positional accuracy of the coordinates allocated to each postcode record. There are seven PQI values for the positional quality of CPLCs. |
postal address | A postal address is a delivery point that is currently receiving mail. There may be many delivery points within an individual building structure as shown in OS MasterMap Topography Layer data. |
postcode | An abbreviated form of address made up of combinations of between six and eight alphanumeric characters. A postcode may cover between 1 and 100 addresses. The average number of addresses per postcode is 15. |
postcode area | An area given a unique alphabetic coding by Royal Mail to facilitate the delivering of mail. The area is identified by one or two alpha characters at the start of the full postcode. |
postcode district | A sub-area of the postcode area, specified by the character sub-string within the first half of a full postcode, which may be numeric, alphabetic, or alphanumeric. |
postcode sector | A sub-area of a postcode district, whose area is identified by the number third from the end of a full postcode. |
postcode unit | A sub-area of a postcode sector, indicated by the two letters of the inward postcode, which identifies one or more small-user postcode delivery points or an individual large-user postcode. |
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