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

Sat Dec 17 04:20:18 UTC 2022

So, I'm going to ignore the sarcasm because it's completely unnecessary and
a complete waste of space.

Before reading the rest of my reply, please do read the following wiki
pages. They will be helpful for you.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/How_We_Map

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ground_truth

Hopefully you read and understood those wiki pages.

OSM prioritizes local tagging guidelines and on-the-ground mapping. What
does this mean? It means that mappers who live in Alberta do indeed know
how the world around them looks and works. They aren't "enraged" by using
the expanded name. The issue is that the name is *not* expanded. It's as
simple as that. The quadrant suffixes are gazetted as NW, NE, SW, and SE.
And it's as simple as that. And just about everything else I could find
does not expand the quadrant suffix. That would be Wikipedia, city and
provincial government websites, bus routes, business websites, etc.

I was originally in the "the names should be expanded" camp. But I talked
to people that live in Alberta, and did my own research, and in the end I
came to the conclusion that I was wrong.

If Alberta has a strange (by non-Alberta standards) way of naming streets,
then according to the on-the-ground rule, that's what the map is going to
display. It's as simple as that.

On Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 10:01 PM W B <bradley.will at gmail.com> wrote:

> >This is kinda interesting, seeing all you people have a big long
> discussion
> about how to map where I live.  If you want me to go out my door and take a
> picture of a street sign, I'd be happy to.  Street signs have NW, NE,
> whatever on them, not the whole word, if they have that at all.
>
> Others have hinted at this but let me be totally clear, the situation
> where every street sign, mailed letter, government document and database
> says stuff like "123 Dr MLK Jr Hwy SE" but we verbally expand that (and
> understand that to mean) "123 Doctor Martin Luther King Junior Highway
> Southeast" is extremely extremely common. It's the case where I live in a
> quadranted city, it's the case in the city of Washington
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/380762 in the It's Not A State
> It's a District of Columbia https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/162069
> and it's just generally the case globally because street signs and
> government databases and even paper maps are often space constrained in
> ways that OSM isn't (as others have said.)
>
> I started out thinking "eh, if locals do it one way let em" but all the
> arguments for abbreviation reduce the case for it in my eyes. (I was really
> ready to believe that up north, "NW" has morphed into a new category of
> word that somehow is pronounced "Northwest" but doesn't mean
> north-westerly!)
>
> The three clinchers for me are that when I open up a popular corporate web
> map in Northeast Calgary, I see streets like 38 St NE. When I look in
> Southwest Calgary I see streets like 104 Ave SW. And that you all agree
> that if you were to say these streets out loud, they'd be unabbreviated:
> just like in the US, the street is "38" or "104" with some prefixes or
> suffixes due to various cute/informative/confusing local plans dating back
> to the city's founding. And finally, database brevity be damned, we did
> find an official database that acknowledges that 104 Ave SW is not a
> special Albertian category of street called one oh four ay vee ee ess
> doubleyou, but rather the 104th road with standard Avenue and Southwest (or
> curiously, "South-west" in one database) that all North Americans are
> familiar with.
>
> > As is the classic debate, this is a renderer
> problem, so if you want anyone to actually use this thing, then if it all
> gets changed to full word in the database, the renderer better show it
> abbreviated, or no one in Calgary would use it.  That's my "I'm a local"
> opinion.
>
> As far as I can tell, this touches on the main real argument for
> abbreviation: "we like it this way and we're not used to the other way so
> shoo" -- which brings up some interesting and useful avenues for
> clarification:
>
> - Many thousands of North Americans already use OSM with various renderers
> and various abbreviation or lack thereof without too much headache,
> including in the places I've lived. Of all the headaches with using OSM for
> navigation, would seeing "104 Avenue Southwest" really be in the top five
> for an average person, above perhaps even "I don't understand why I have to
> download the map manually" or "why are the highways pink with white
> squares" or "why does it list city, then street, then house number?" Is
> this truly a huge dealbreaker for an average Albertan and if so can you
> elaborate beyond "I like it this way" (or "I don't want to change my oil
> company software?") -- I really am ready to believe that grandma will break
> down in tears seeing "Southwest" written out, and schoolchildren will write
> OSMF angry letters en masse for disrespecting their ways, but it's on you
> guys to make that argument, we can't pretend to know your lived
> experiences. But so far again everything I've read sounds like every other
> city with directional suffixes in America; I haven't heard a single unique
> argument yet.
>
> - If it's indeed an important and dealbreaking user preference to see
> Alberta-localized data in a familiar way, but the underlying database is
> normalized unfamiliarly, then you're absolutely right that it's a renderer
> problem, and OSM has very clear guidelines about tagging for the renderer
> versus tagging the reality of the situation according to policies and
> consensus: the database should be as globally consistent as possible (with
> the Americas shoving our highway and jurisdiction system into the European
> motorway and admin_level hierarchies and everything) and the fight should
> be taken to renderers to produce human-usable products that make people
> happy in the real world. Remember that the database vs renderer issue isn't
> just an abstract principle: in one of my FOSS contributions I'm having to
> deal with the case where foreign language speakers are navigating around
> streets in a different language and expecting the output to make sense:
> that sometimes means speaking "roundabout" and "in 500 feet" in Japanese
> despite Japan having no roundabouts and using meters, and vice versa. If
> "SW" is pronounced and translated as "south west" then I really need the
> database to have it expanded if I have a prayer of delivering a good
> product. If Albertans are enraged by expanded abbreviations or if Alberta
> itself is unnavigable without matching the letters "SW" exactly, that's
> actually two very separate issues with separate fixes, because Albertans
> travel to other locales and other people visit Alberta. If there's a real
> issue here it serves everyone to pinpoint it and get it right.
>
> - On an average day, typical humans don't use the OSM database or
> osm-carto directly, but they might use an OSM-derived product like a map
> inside their social media app or their package delivery driver uses it to
> find their house. We have many tools available to us to make modern
> renderers that adapt to human needs, like Brian's own Americana renderer
> project, that can use vector data to display map data in whatever manner a
> user needs. Heck even OrganicMaps could possibly have an "abbreviate street
> names" feature to declutter the map view. We can (and need to, for sanity)
> record data in a standardized way so that the views of that data are
> adaptable and resilient. The database is the singular thing we have to all
> agree on, but we can and do have a thousand different renderings of that
> database that all operate off shared assumptions documented in the OSM wiki.
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