I have worked with these issues for a number of years in my
professional life. We have found that it is better to spell out
street names. As Matthias pointed out, it is far easier to convert a
named that is spelled out to one that is abbreviated than the other
way around. I have seen far too many problems with going the other
way. Cases where "Dr" was expanded to "Doctor", "St" was expanded to
"Saint", etc (and vise versa) when that was not the intention. By
spelling out the names we make it easier for the application consuming
the data (e.g. a renderer) to make its own decision as to whether to
abbreviate or not. If we use abbreviations, we lock the application
into using abbreviations (and using the same abbreviations), or at the
very least, make it difficult to do otherwise.
Having said that, I think it is a bad idea to have a bot going through
and attempting to expand abbreviations.
Mike
On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 11:27 AM, am12 <a...@bolis.com> wrote:
>
>>What do people think?
>
> It is easy (I think) to know what "St", "Ave", and "Blvd" mean at the end
> of the name. The rest of them aren't always clear. I recently had to
> figure out what a "Lp" was ("Loop" - this one was new to me).
>
> I used to live on "Southbay Drive". I would get mail addressed as "South
> Bay Drive", even though there were no north/south address prefixes used
> anywhere nearby. The strangest was when I would get mail addressed as "S
> Bay Drive". Fortunately there was no Bay Drive in my zipcode.
>
> - Alan
>
>
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>
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