[Tagging] [Talk-us] street name expansion thoughts

[John F. Eldredge]

Toby Murray <toby.murray at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 7:34 PM, Clifford Snow
> <clifford at snowandsnow.us> wrote:
> > I've been cleaning up are area of Jackson County, NC and found roads
> where
> > the name expansion algorithm failed to expand all of the
> abbreviations . For
> > example Yellow Bird Br Road.
> >
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=35.36564&lon=-83.24253&zoom=17&layers=M
> > (not fixed yet)
> >
> > I didn't write down the problems thinking at first it was just an
> > abnormality.
> >
> > I think it might be worth while to look at the names in the TIGER
> database
> > for Jackson County NC to see why the names are not being expanded
> properly.
> > I'll try to pull up a list tomorrow to see if it can help improve
> the
> > expansion algorithm.
> 
> I assume the Br is supposed to be "Branch"? It seems to just be an
> oddity in the TIGER data. The "name" field, where you would see "Main"
> for "North Main Street" has the value of "Yellow Bird Br"
> 
> It might be because this road seems to have two type suffixes: Branch
> and Road. But the TIGER data model only allows for one so they shoved
> the first one into the name field. Ideally (IMO) they should have put
> "Branch" in its unabbreviated form into the name field. But I guess
> that would have been too easy. Have you found very many of these?
> 
> I suppose one could try to find abbreviations in the name field... but
> that might get messy. At the end of the day, no algorithm can correct
> for some of the quirks in the source data so we have to accept some of
> the glitches.
> 
> Toby
> 


Yellow Bird Branch would be the name of a stream, and Yellow Bird Branch Road would be a road named after the stream.  "Branch" is Southern dialect for a small stream.  There is a stream in my neighborhood, in Nashville, TN, named Sorghum Branch.  So, "Branch" is part of the road name, not a suffix.


-- 
John F. Eldredge -- john at jfeldredge.com
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria