This week it’s all about your postcode…
A story of lotteries and Big Gaz
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the joys of creating a new postcode lookup tool to replace the district selection tool we have used on the new www.buckinghamshire.gov.uk. This week we finally delivered it!
Traditionally we have navigated people to the correct legacy site by asking them which district they were in, but this was becoming a little old school.
We have been a unitary authority for more than 18 months now and we were all keen to move to a system where we just asked for their postcode and then users deep linked to the content that was relevant to them.
Now submitting the query above will take you to the information regarding bin collection times on what was the Aylesbury Vale District legacy site.
So far so good. But we were also aware that we had postcodes that straddled multiple districts, and even some where some of the properties in the postcode may not be in our county at all.
For these we had to dig a little deeper, for those the magic of UPRNs came into play. UPRN stands for Unique Property Reference Number and was created by the Ordnance Survey (OS). It consists of numbers of up to 12 digits in length. Local governments in the UK have allocated a unique number for each land or property. So if we had a data source that tied a property to it’s UPRN and we could then link the UPRN to a district, that might work.
This is where Big Gaz popped their head up. Big Gaz is our internal gazetteer that list all the properties in Buckinghamshire, along with loads of information including which district the property is in.
Take SL6 0JA for example, it contains properties that are in what was both South Bucks and Wycombe. But why does that matter I hear you cry, surely you are one council now. Well we are but we still have remnants, including back end systems such as Revs and Bens and Waste, that still march to separate tunes. This will change, but for now we need to be able to work out who empties your bins.
So how did we fix this. Over to our great dev team lead by Nick and Dave at Torchbox. They have designed a system that knows when you are in one of these areas, and digs a little deeper, effectively giving you the ability to select your property from a list
Select the top one of these and you will be sent to South Bucks to review your bin day, select Hedsor Lodge and you will end up on the old Wycombe site. It sounds complicated but it’s really not, thanks to some fantastic front end design by the team at Unboxed, and the sterling development work done by the technical team at Torchbox.
So that’s this weeks little victory. Not only is Big Gaz proving his worth in Gold, but it’s also future proofed for the coming years. Bravo!
