I would say the primary use of address data in OSM is geocoding, not mail delivery. There may be legitimate differences between a street name and the address of a house along that street but abbreviations are not a legitimate difference. The Census Bureau also has a list of 503 "official" abbreviations[1]. Which one should we use?
The answer is: Neither. It is always easier to go from full names to abbreviations for display than to go the other way around. (See Mapquest tiles - they abbreviate street names) Therefore we should always store things un-abbreviated. No ambiguity, no questions about which list of abbreviations, no one making their own abbreviations. Everything is explicit. [1] https://github.com/ToeBee/ogr2osm-translations/blob/master/tiger2012_abbrv.csv Toby On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 1:22 PM, David K <vidthe...@gmail.com> wrote: > The United States Postal Service prefers addresses to be written with > abbreviations used, and they maintain a list of official abbreviations. I > suppose they really only care about addresses written on physical mail, but > then again this is the primary purpose of mail addresses. > > I know of multiple examples of places where the street name in the > official addresses of houses on a street does not exactly match the name of > the street itself. There is therefore no reason to insist these values > should match. > > My conclusion is that address data should appear in the data as it > properly does on a piece of mail, which includes using USPS standard > abbreviations, and deviating from the road name in other ways where the > postmaster has prescribed such deviation. > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-us mailing list > Talk-us@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us > >
_______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
