Wow a useful online goverment service

You might not believe it but the UK government can sometimes put some really useful information online at least for a software development. I recently needed to validate a postcode and possibly some other information and a search on the web brought me to this part of the Cabinet Office website UK Government Data Standards Catalogue which contains a listing of many common data types used in the UK, along with UML diagrams, XML schema, validation and verification information which is contributed by various government departments. Some of these items even have regular expressions you can use to validate the data with contained with their XML schemas. This information can be extremely useful in helping to ensure there are fewer errors in data entry which I have noticed can be a frequent problem as I found when validating postcodes. When entering postcodes people will often put in an ‘O’ where there should be a zero and an ‘I’ where there should be a one. I think it pays to have good data and it’s much easier to fix mistakes earlier in the process rather than later when it might prove much more difficult to resolve the problems. At least my taxes have gone on something useful unlike some of the horribly inefficient construction work I’ve seen in Swansea’s SA1 area.