[Talk-ca] What do I poutine the name tag of a road with a suffix?

Sun Dec 11 07:49:02 UTC 2022

Hey Minh,

You have some great points there, and they do need to be considered.

I do have a genuine question. If a street name is consistently written a
certain way, and someone tagged it as it is written, would that be
considered tagging for the renderer?

According to a friend of a friend that lives in Calgary, a street would
always be written as "Shaganappi Trail NW", but would always be pronounced
as "Shaganappi Trail Northwest".

And I'll copy paste a message from a OSM contributor from Calgary that I've
been communicating with:

"Just to clear up a point. You are absolutely correct in OSM SE should be
written out as Southeast. I completely agree…. Except in Alberta and a
small part of BC ( sorry Dawson creek we found gas so we took you along)
When the DLS was done it was broken into the quadrants and sections and
what note and those quadrants became NE,NW,SE,SW. All fine. until Alberta
decided that the SE and what not would become part of the name and not just
a direction. And this is the confusion. SE is not southeast…. it is just
simply SE. And this becomes the legal land description. This was then
applied to everything including roads. Roadways are defined in the ATS and
that land became part of the name. So not really an abbreviation anymore
but and actual word.

You are correct services using OSM may not know what NW is. But in Alberta
is is treated as the name and not really a direction at all. And this
becomes and issue for services that are trying to use Alberta (and other
areas to be honest) without understand this slight difference. This is also
my problem. With the global change to OSM I can no longer use it as a data
source as the names are simply wrong. This is how we name everything from
road to well sites.

So I agree with you that directions should be spelled out as you have done.
Except with the direction isn’t a direction at all it is the actual name."

I hope this helps.

On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 1:30 AM Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us>
wrote:

> Vào lúc 21:09 2022-12-10, Michael Stark đã viết:
> > Calgary (and other parts of Alberta) are definitely strange in terms of
> > the quadrant suffixes. When written, the names are always abbreviated.
> > But when spoken, the names are always spoken unabbreviated.
>
> Sorry to pile on again from south of the border, but I just wanted to
> make sure that the community in Alberta is aware that abbreviations --
> especially without periods -- are much less likely to be processed
> correctly by text-to-speech engines.
>
> Almost every navigation application uses a general-purpose TTS engine
> that wasn't designed specifically for navigation, such as the one that
> comes with your phone. Some premium TTS engines have extended the SSML
> standard to avoid ambiguity when interpreting things like street names.
> But these options are much more limited than what mappers may be hoping
> for when they choose to abbreviate.
>
> For example, in Amazon Polly and Google Cloud TTS, you can mark up the
> entire street name with <say-as interpret-as="address"> to expand
> abbreviations. This option is designed for text that is consistently
> abbreviated, such as "Main St SW". Sometimes you get lucky with
> partially abbreviated text, for example with "2 Avenue S" ("two avenue
> south") [1]. On the other hand, "S Bank Trail" [2] is still pronounced
> "ess bank trail" even when interpreted as an address.
>
> It would be easy to chalk this up to an industry-wide bug, but if
> interpreting the street name as an address were to more aggressively
> expand abbreviations, then "E Street" [3] would be "east street". Down
> south, this option already produces slapstick comedy like routes 9L and
> 35W pronounced as "nine liters" and "thirty-five watts", respectively.
>
> When I wrote guidance software in the past, I was aware that some local
> communities probably preferred to abbreviate some things like quadrant
> suffixes. However, the software needed to be functional in every country
> in every language and even support switching TTS engines when going
> offline, so there was little opportunity to fine-tune the behavior to
> local idiosyncrasies on a platform that I had little control over.
>
> I can't help but wonder if some of the motivation to abbreviate the
> street names comes from how folks would like to see openstreetmap-carto
> display them. Maybe that isn't "lying to the renderer" per se [4], but
> it is ironic, considering that other tile layers like Mapbox Streets and
> OpenMapTiles would abbreviate these quadrant suffixes anyways. Surely
> the tradeoff of having to tag name:pronunciation would annoy most
> mappers; that key is only designed for overrides for unavoidable edge
> cases. [5]
>
> Even if renderers matter more than routers, these TTS engine limitations
> matter for renderers too. For example, a blind person using a Mapbox- or
> MapLibre-powered map on their iPhone will hear street names pronounced
> by VoiceOver [6], which doesn't support the address extension I
> mentioned earlier. I already see some sidewalk ways around Calgary and
> Edmonton, so I'll spare you my spiel about the importance of
> accessibility mapping.
>
> There seemed to be some recognition way back in 2008 at the beginning of
> this mailing list that abbreviations would be a cause for trouble. [7]
> But if, despite that awareness, the local community is content with how
> its customary tagging is realistically going to be processed, then step
> 1 is to document the convention and step 2 is to get used to gently
> reminding outsiders of it forevermore.
>
> (Full disclosure: I work for mobile navigation software at Mapbox and am
> proud of the many things we have special-cased to work better in Canada.)
>
> [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/296323533
> [2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/117289520
> [3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/31584016
> [4] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_for_the_renderer
> [5]
>
> https://blog.mapbox.com/turn-by-turn-voice-guidance-upgraded-to-amazon-polly-27734cf4a6e8
> [6]
>
> https://blog.mapbox.com/accessible-maps-for-blindness-or-visual-impairment-on-ios-5c7911c349c4
> [7]
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ca/2008-March/000027.html
>
> --
> minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
>
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