OACoder Software

Geodemographic classifications are small area classifications of social, economic and demographic characteristics. The Output Area Classification (OAC) is a free geodemographic classification. It is an ONS (Office of National Statistics) validated measure that summarises neighbourhood conditions at the Output Area Level across the United Kingdom. Linkage of this valuable statistics has been problematic for users more used to address records that are georeferenced using unit postcodes. ONS has recently made available an open licence version of the NSPD (National Statistics Postcode Directory), which usefully includes an OAC Code for each unit postcode in the UK. OACoder allows the users to read a CSV file containing a list of postcodes, uses the NSPD to append the corresponding OAC code for each of the postcoded addresses, and writes the resultant records to a CSV file. This software is made available under a GPL-3.0 license, and is described in the following paper: Muhammad, A. 2013. OACoder: Postcode Coding Tool. Journal of Open Research Software, 1(1) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/511ba2c94d661