Essentially the same deal in Ireland, with Eircodes. They were originally created as private dataset with ownership, and now you have to license access to it to use it.
Eircodes are better than postcodes, in that there's 1 per building/address/apartment, however they're discontinuous, so adjacent buildings will have distinctly different eircodes.
The article highlighted the difficulty of shopping centers and apartment buildings, from my experience trying to validate a large number of Eircode <-> addresses for a project, this is definitely an issue. The worse issue is that there's no way to just send someone out to check, because the eircode isn't like a house number that's posted somewhere. (Leaving aside the problem that valid Irish addresses can have no numbers outside of the eircode, and eircodes are a recent, and therefore non-traditional addition)
Eircodes also aren't used by An Post, to add insult to injury.
> The worse issue is that there's no way to just send someone out to check, because the eircode isn't like a house number that's posted somewhere. (Leaving aside the problem that valid Irish addresses can have no numbers outside of the eircode, and eircodes are a recent, and therefore non-traditional addition)
The HSE National Ambulance Service (NAS) National Emergency Operations Centres (NEOCs) have a GIS package that resolves Eircodes (and other traditional and colloquial addresses) to actual buildings and building entrances in real-time, which actually quite impressive. The directions can be transmitted to ambulances and other assets in real-time and has reduces delays in clinical services due to address confusion enormously since 2016.
So the country is capable. Eircode is what we chose as a country, not what we were limited to.
Eircodes are better than postcodes, in that there's 1 per building/address/apartment, however they're discontinuous, so adjacent buildings will have distinctly different eircodes.
The article highlighted the difficulty of shopping centers and apartment buildings, from my experience trying to validate a large number of Eircode <-> addresses for a project, this is definitely an issue. The worse issue is that there's no way to just send someone out to check, because the eircode isn't like a house number that's posted somewhere. (Leaving aside the problem that valid Irish addresses can have no numbers outside of the eircode, and eircodes are a recent, and therefore non-traditional addition)