I’ve done a lot of work to manage getting more than 95% of my Places geocoded. But today noticed I might have made some greivous errors by using the ‘Geocode selected place’ option whenever I could… Let me explain.
In my example, I’ll use Ashwellthorpe, Norfolk, England, United Kingdom. Using the Geocode selected place option, I received an input of 52.5283999 N, 1.1552298 E. Generally, I cross-check everything these days with multile sources… Wikipedia has a page for Ashwellthorpe and Fundenhall. There, I found the DMS value as 52°32′N 1°10′E, or Decimal input 52.53, 1.17 according to Wiki’s link to GeoHack. But, the website Gazetteer.Org.UK provides a Lat/Long of 52.535162, 1.1453621…
Just to check if the discrepancy in RM was in finding the county, Norfolk, instead of Ashwelthorpe, I found Wikipedia says Norfolk is 52.6725, 0.95… So, that’s not the problem.
I want to be as accurate as possible without any bias to a specific unreliable source. Why is this so difficult? Who am I to believe?
The difference between 1.14 and 1.17 arc degrees is only about 3 kilometers. The variance between the sources you mention is probably just down to where someone chose to take the reading from.
Given that Gazetter of British Place Names bills itself as "The definitive reference source to the United Kingdom. Explore over 300,000 places., that seems as good a choice as any.
Another option would be to contact the local parish council and get their input.
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I completely agree. I guess my expectation (and probably that of others) is that RM11 use a definitive reference source itself. If the software offers to properly geocode a place, it should properly geocode a place. It is taking me hours of research to find a reasonable definitive geocode for over 1,000 locations in my database. Imagine someone with a truly larger database attempting the same…
As a suggestion, the Gazeteer.Org.UK site offers a free downloadable CSV file with their 305,000+ geocoded locations. Their data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Couldn’t the RM development team download and use that, as well, for their geocode process?
Gazeteer.Org.UK is not totally reliable unfortunately. I just put in my village name on the website and it came up with the wrong county. I then tried my postcode which is a new one, having been created for a new housing development only 2 years ago. It still said we are in Gloucestershire whereas this area was transferred to the neighbouring county of Warwickshire in 1931. So, cross checking would be my advice!