[Talk-ca] I'd like to run something to add a French street name tag in Ottawa

[john whelan]

I'm more than happy for it to be called something other than bot.  Fred or
program perhaps?

The objective here is to simply display the road name on the map in the
language of choice.

The background to the request is:

Ottawa has two distinct languages.  Francophones when talking among
themselves would refer to Slater as rue Slater, Anglophones would say Slater
street.  Both are in common use.  My estimate is the majority say 75% speak
English as their first language, 25% use French.

The normal rule for OSM is put what is on the street sign in the name
field.  Unfortunately this doesn't work in Ottawa.  Some older street signs
are just in English, the newer ones are bilingual such as "rue Slater
Street", thus they are inconsistent.

Users like to be able to search for a street name on a map easily.  With
Maperitive currently you would need to enter name="rue Slater Street" which
is neither completely English or French nor easy for a layman to remember.

The city in many of its systems just refers to Slater as Slater and takes
great care that there is only one Slater in the city be it street, drive or
whatever.  In Ottawa roughly 99%+, of roads have just the English name in
the name field.

The proposal is to add an extra name tag to those streets that do not have a
name:fr tag already with the French version of the name so that renders such
as Maperitive can render the map with the French street names.  Maperitive
now has the capability use a set of rules that does this.  This has been
tested and shown to display street names in French correctly on a small area
of Ottawa.

The rules for Fred or the program are specifically designed to omit anything
that isn't simply an English street name in the name field and to add an
additional tag which will be ignored by existing rendering systems.  Any
road name that has been entered as per the newer street signs such as "rue
Slater Street" will be ignored as the second word is not on the list.  There
are very few of these.

This also has the advantage that we can draw a square over Ottawa that
overlaps Gatineau since the streets in Gatineau are named only in French
thus will not be touched.

This approach can only be used in Ottawa or somewhere that uses standardised
street names.  For example it could not be used in Calgary where they use a
different set of road names and there is a danger that two different roads
would end up with the same French translation.  The translations have all
been verified against a range of streets signs.  Unfortunately "croissant
Cara Crescent" is too long for the street sign so it is displayed as "cr
Cara cr".  On some signs crescent is shortened to cres by the way.

The data has come from three major sources over time, satellite tracing,
Import, and people on the ground.  As far as I can tell there are currently
only two or three people active on the ground but more than two hundred have
entered data probably via satellite tracing.  So how and why it was done the
way it was done would be difficult to find out and also not really of much
value.

Politically French is important in Ottawa, probably because federal
government tries hard to be bilingual.  Currently the City of Ottawa has
released a fair chunk of open data which would be useful to OSM if it could
be imported.  However the license needs to be aligned with ODbL before it is
of much use to OSM.  I'm hoping the ability of displaying street names in
French will make them more receptive to releasing the city's data under
OBbL.  If Ottawa does this that increases the pressure on other cites to
follow suit.

Does that cover your questions?

Thank's for your input.

Cheerio John




On 22 June 2010 04:30, Gregory <nomoregrapes at googlemail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 21 June 2010 00:32, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I won't run it against the live data and change the data on the server
>> unless the community thinks this is a good idea.  You and I think it
>> is; let's see if some others support the idea.
>>
>>
> Don't call it a bot. Bots are bad.*
>
> My questions are why have these names been given "Street" not "rue". I
> don't think name:xx is supposed to be a literal translation but what people
> of that language would call it. Sometimes there are road signs with both
> languages on. Some of these might (for whatever, possibly wrong, reason)
> have "Street" after the French name. Some might just be the user not
> thinking, or having missing data.
>
> Knowing a reason for a lot of the "Street" names would give support to your
> changes. E.g. a user explaining their lazy entry or seeing a selection are
> from imports.
> How will we know the changes were made by your script? Maybe tagging every
> element isn't necessary and just explain in the changeset description.
>
>
> *You can call it a bot if it is restricted to an area. Like you are doing,
> and so you count me as supporting this.
> If you have at least 1-2 people who have an eye over the place then, in my
> view, you should be allowed to do it. This means you must have support at
> the very least for each provenance you do it for. For example I only knew
> the Western half of Vancouver, you would have to also get the support of
> someone who lives/maps in the East to support you for a city-wide change.
>
> With getting boundaries, can you just run it on a bounding box that seems
> to encompass the whole city? What will happen outside: no name:fr will be
> found, or they will be changed with just the same accuracy/affect as the
> ones in the city?
>
>
> Also the value of my support got a half-life since I left Canada at the
> start of May, and I don't know about the french side. Hopefully you're happy
> for me to add these thinking points even if you decide to not care about
> them.
>
> --
> Gregory
> osm at livingwithdragons.com
> http://www.livingwithdragons.com
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org
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>
>
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