On 22 April 2010 01:18, Apollinaris Schoell <ascho...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:36 PM, andrzej zaborowski <balr...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> Where's damage in that -- is it in that you can now read the name out >> without checking the documentation for what that funny string means in >> that particular database that is TIGER? You can now also write an >> intelligent search engine that will understand both forms, you can >> pipe the names through text-to-speach and do a lot more. >> > > there is damage by doing it wrong, others have pointed to it already. > I am not deep enough into the history of the abbreviations used and who > defined them. But I am pretty sure there is a lot of errors.
I don't know who defined the ones used in TIGER but this is not the only way to abbreviate the names, that is proven by USPS having their own list that is not identical. The most popular words will be the same in both lists but some are really cryptic and arbitrary, could as well be numeric codes. Then TIGER also includes Spanish names and the list has abbreviations for those too, which rarely anyone in US can read, while they can cope with unabbreviated ok. > - in the city I live there is no street sign with street, avenue, boulevard, > .... and even more surprising there are no abbreviations either. osm > principle is to map what's on the ground. So tiger import is definitely > wrong and expanding the names is also wrong. on the other hand postal > address usually use it in one or the other form so it's not completely > fiction. For the record street signs on different ends of the same street often use different forms and you'll sometimes find really strange conventions, so while I agree mapping what's on the ground is good because stuff can be confirmed, in this case it's not a solution. In many places you'll find the names are all caps on the signs but in a local newspaper they're capitalized the usual way. The signs are posted there by authorities so this is similar to having access to a tiny piece of a map or database made by these authorities. For maps people usually agreed on this list that we don't trust them. > - many geocding engines do not find expanded names. even google doesn't in > many cases. To me it looks like nearly anyone doesn't use the expanded name > at all. So my question is is the expanded name really the correct name? I don't know but it seems it's the only unambiguous form. If you look at the names in TIGER, Bing, Google and USPS-abbreviated then they're all different and the only common trace is they're somehow derived from the full version. >> The reason it was done with a script is that doing it manually was >> taking a lot of time and mappers were spending that time doing this >> instead of going out mapping. And it's always been on the wiki about >> not using abbreviated names, even when the original import was done, >> ignoring this. > > can you provide any stats that mappers spent time on it instead doing > anything better? Only as an inditaction, I spent a while doing that whenever I visited a place and at least another two people on IRC asked if there was any way to do it automatically, in JOSM or otherwise and we tried to find a way to do it in JOSM or with simple regexes on the .osm file but it seemed a much better idea to do it consistently for the whole area and according to actual documentation that accompanies TIGER. > Is the wiki any better as a reference than what is in the osm DB? I could > change the wiki and then will someone write a bot to reverse it? Is the wiki > written with the situation in US in mind? Well one good rule is if there should be any rules then they should be global. You could surely change the wiki but it's a conclusion that a lot of people individually seem to come to so I'm sure you wouldn't even need a bot before someone would add a phrase to that effect. Cheers _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
