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

Tue Dec 13 16:18:25 UTC 2022

Canada post has it's own set of oddities.  For example two locations in
Canada are not local government boundaries.  One is Orleans which is part
of the postal address for locations near what was the Orleans postal
sorting office but it never has been a local government location now being
part of the city of Ottawa and previously part was in Glouster and part in
Cumberland.

The problem comes with searching for an address, do you enter NW or North
West?  Which does the search engine understand?  If we are dealing with
speech software perhaps the best way is a name:speech tag or even multiple
tags with the different possibilities.

Alberta likes to be independent in many ways and may not see the benefits
of a standardized naming convention.

Apols for not giving a black and white solution.

Cheerio John

On Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 11:07 Brian M. Sperlongano <zelonewolf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks John and others for the deep dive.
>
> I did some poking around and found several cities in Alberta[1] and
> British Columbia[2] that use the fully-spelled out "Northwest" rather than
> "NW", exclusively, as well as a few places that use a mix of both styles.
> Naturally this list grows much larger when you look for the simpler
> cardinal directions of "North", "South", "East", and "West"
>
> Below is a query you can stick into overpass turbo to look at the data
> yourself.  For example, in Saskatchewan there are 1400 streets that have an
> "East" suffix.
>
> [out:json][timeout:3600];
> {{geocodeArea:Name_of_province}}->.a;
> way[name~" East$"](area.a);
> (._;>;);
> out skel qt;
>
> Does the Canadian mapping community feel that these suffixes,
> fully-spelled-out in these and other locations in Canada, are in error
> and require correction?  If so, where does a mapper go to determine the
> "correct" variant of the road's name? Is it "Canada Post", and if so, is
> that a source that can be used for OSM?
>
> If these are not errors, can anyone supply a rule that states which cities
> and/or provinces in Canada should use the abbreviated forms and which
> places should use the fully-spelled out variant?  Or should these be
> abbreviated for all of Canada?  Or does it differ from location to location
> and a mapper must look it up in some sort of database?  This information is
> important not just for mappers, but also for data consumers, who need this
> information to write location-specific processing.
>
> Please forgive the constant barrage of questions, as I'm trying to
> understand the exact, specific rule used for the naming convention so that
> it can be properly documented.
>
>
> [1] Alberta:
> Drumheller - https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/51.4661/-112.7082
> Medicine Hat - https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/50.0519/-110.6946
>
> [2] British Columbia
> Creston - https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/49.0999/-116.5228
> Chetwynd - https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/55.69877/-121.63603
> Salmon Arm - https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/50.6982/-119.2979
>
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 5:14 AM john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> My personal view is in Alberta they should remain NW etc.
>>
>> This is what they are called locally.  Canada Post postcode lookup which
>> is as close to an official name as you'll find in Canada uses them as they
>> are and Canada Post does spell out rd etc.
>>
>> Cheerio John
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 12:21 AM , <iain at monkeyface.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Brian,
>>>
>>> I think I will weigh in on this conversation.
>>>
>>> I think this conversation has been going on for at least 122 years……
>>> From what I can actually find.
>>>
>>> To clear up the “sources” instead of internet lore they come from the
>>> Alberta survey Act. The ATS (has already been mentioned here) and the
>>> Hudson Bay reserve plan (still in use today) and the Dominion Land Survey.
>>>
>>> After the start of this thread I did some digging around as to the “why”
>>> to see what I could come up with. As we seem to just use this and it is
>>> legislated. And I think for this thread it comes down to when a cardinal
>>> direction is not a cardinal direction but a name. This seems to have come
>>> from a disagreement between CP rail and Saskatchewan and Alberta surveyors.
>>> And the legislation was changed from a cardinal Northwest to NW and should
>>> never be expanded reason being is the pattern of NW-SW-NW-SW that would
>>> happen every quarter mile if you walked Alberta North to South. So the
>>> cardinal system was abandoned and you just write NW. This became the legal
>>> land description.
>>>
>>> The legislation we have in Alberta is the same as Saskatchewan and
>>> Manitoba. Parts of BC also follow this but I didn’t look to closely into
>>> BC. There are exceptions to these rules that are also defined in the Survey
>>> Act as well as the ATS. Machine Hat was already mentioned as an odd ball
>>> and they are right it is excluded. So is Fort MacMurray. Pierre mention
>>> that Quebec does not abbreviate roads. And neither does the French
>>> community of Beaumont in Alberta. I believe all road signs are in French
>>> there. This also applies to any federal land so Indian reserves, the the
>>> air ranges are out as well.
>>>
>>> That said most things are very well defined in legislation. But there
>>> are some grey areas. Deerfoot Trail for example. This was a federal road at
>>> one point. Signs are simply north and south. I would question if Deerfoot
>>> should have Deerfoot SE in the name at all. I would also as about 16 ave
>>> where it becomes the transcanada.
>>>
>>> If anyone wants to see the physical remains of this dispute they can
>>> look at 16 avenue SW and 7 street SW. 16 ave just disappears from where CP
>>> rail put it and the Alberta Surveyors corrected it. Alberta also doesn’t
>>> use UTM coordinate system…. We made our own because…. Well because we have
>>> to be difficult. It is the 3TM and it is used everywhere outside of
>>> Edmonton and Calgary. Also we changed our map projections between forested
>>> areas and grasslands
>>>
>>> So when NW is just a place holder and not a direction is that this comes
>>> down to for a lot of people in the prairies.
>>>
>>> Iain
>>>
>>> On Dec 12, 2022, at 9:20 PM, Brian M. Sperlongano <zelonewolf at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Again "someone told me something offhand" is not useful or helpful for
>>> public discussion.
>>>
>>> If the Calgary mapping community has a convention to map streets exactly
>>> according to a specific government database or to satisfy a specific data
>>> consumer, then I await their description of specifically what the standards
>>> are so that mappers can map freely to documented standards without being
>>> harassed.
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 11:17 PM Michael Stark <michael60634 at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hey Brian,
>>>>
>>>> I believe you accidentally replied to me specifically instead of
>>>> clicking "reply all".
>>>>
>>>> "Anecdotal stories which can't be publicly examined are not helpful."
>>>>
>>>> I don't know the name of the software in question. All I know is that
>>>> the person that uses this software contacted me after my changes broke it.
>>>> I don't know if he wants to be identified here as he has told me that he
>>>> has had past issues with mailing list, so I have not mentioned his name.
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 9:54 PM Michael Stark <michael60634 at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hey Brian,
>>>>>
>>>>> I'll jump in to answer your questions.
>>>>>
>>>>> The names are abbreviated in Calgary (and most other places in
>>>>> Alberta) because that's how they are officially written. It's not something
>>>>> local mappers decided.
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't have a specific example, but the mapper I was talking to whose
>>>>> software broke works in the oil and gas industry. I assume the software
>>>>> broke because the OSM names didn't match the official names from the
>>>>> provincial or local government.
>>>>>
>>>>> I hope these answers are helpful.
>>>>>
>>>>> Warm regards,
>>>>> Michael
>>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 9:39 PM Brian M. Sperlongano <
>>>>> zelonewolf at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 10:17 PM Hoser AB <hoserab1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Well Brian, the answer to question 1 is pretty straight forward: I
>>>>>>> don't really know whether it's more or less ignored or accepted
>>>>>>> in Washington, District of Columbia (abbreviations are a no-no, don'tcha
>>>>>>> know? ;) ). And I don't really care either.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm sorry, but this does not answer my question.  I'll state it again:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Is the decision to abbreviate names in Calgary based on something
>>>>>> different about Calgary from the rest of the world, or is it just a
>>>>>> convention that local mappers have chosen based on preference?  Please
>>>>>> forgive me for asking this directly, as it's the crux of the discussion.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> With respect to question 2, there are users of OSM data for whom
>>>>>>> making a seemingly subtle change from e.g. "37 Street SW" to
>>>>>>> "Thirty-seventh Street Southwest" is going to break the functionality of
>>>>>>> whatever it is they're using it for
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Can you give a specific example of software that will break by
>>>>>> following the global convention to abbreviate names, or is this just a
>>>>>> hypothetical?  How does that software deal with the rest of the world using
>>>>>> expanded (non-abbreviated) names?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> Talk-ca mailing list
>>>>>> Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org
>>>>>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
>>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Talk-ca mailing list
>>> Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org
>>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Talk-ca mailing list
>>> Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org
>>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
>>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ca/attachments/20221213/0f05b033/attachment-0001.htm>