What is the code at the end of this 'address'

Question

I am attempting to get longitude and latitude coordinates from a list of locations in London. Each item in said list has the district name and a four-letter hexadecimal code at the end, and these don't seem to be documented anywhere.

City of London 001C
City of London 001D
City of London 001E
Barking and Dagenham 016A
Barking and Dagenham 015A
Barking and Dagenham 015B

Any clue?

Answer 1

These could be either LSOA (Lower Layer Super Output Area) codes or MSOA (Middle Layer Super Output Area) codes. I believe all the codes you've pasted are both legal LSOA and MSOA codes. (Many larger LSOAs are their own MSOA.)

An LSOA is a group of contiguous output areas (OAs) based on groups of post codes. There are 34,378 LOSAs in England and Wales. An MSOA is one or more LSOAs. There are 7,193 MSOAs in England and Wales.

Information is as of the 2001 census.

You can find more details at the web site of the Office for National Statistics.

Answer 2

It looks as though you've got the LSOA data with names. LSOA is Lower Layer Super Output Area which is just another method of identifying different area's in census and other statistical data. You can learn more about it here, but you shouldn't need it for lat/long and other coordinate work - it's more statistical than anything.

Answer 3

There's an N-Triple file on the same site that David suggested in his comment to his answer above. On OPEN DATA COMMUNITIES' Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) page click on a dump of all triples in this dataset as a zipped n-triples file.

That file contains entries like

<http://opendatacommunities.org/id/geography/lsoa/E01000006> <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type> <http://opendatacommunities.org/def/geography#LSOA> .
<http://opendatacommunities.org/id/geography/lsoa/E01000006> <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#label> "Barking and Dagenham 016A" .
<http://opendatacommunities.org/id/geography/lsoa/E01000006> <http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ontology/spatialrelations/easting> "544933"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#integer> .
<http://opendatacommunities.org/id/geography/lsoa/E01000006> <http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ontology/spatialrelations/northing> "184296"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#integer> .
<http://opendatacommunities.org/id/geography/lsoa/E01000006> <http://opendatacommunities.org/def/geography#boundaryAsJSON> <http://opendatacommunities.org/files/lsoa_boundaries/E01000006.json> .
<http://opendatacommunities.org/id/geography/lsoa/E01000006> <http://statistics.data.gov.uk/def/administrative-geography/district> <http://statistics.data.gov.uk/id/local-authority-district/00AB> .
<http://opendatacommunities.org/id/geography/lsoa/E01000006> <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#sameAs> <http://statistics.data.gov.uk/id/statistical-geography/E01000006> .
<http://opendatacommunities.org/id/geography/lsoa/E01000006> <http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#lat> "51.53895"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#decimal> .
<http://opendatacommunities.org/id/geography/lsoa/E01000006> <http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#long> "0.08841"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#decimal> .
<http://opendatacommunities.org/id/geography/lsoa/E01000006> <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#notation> "E01000006" .

Which would give you the latitude (51.53895) and longitude (0.08841) of the LSOA labelled "Barking and Dagenham 016A"