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

Sun Dec 18 01:55:46 UTC 2022

It becomes a database concern when the gazetted name, which is what you'll
currently find on OSM, is changed. Then you have issues with stuff not
working. Calling it a renderer issue is not correct. And again, OSM favours
local guidelines and ground-truth.

On Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 7:30 PM W B <bradley.will at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure anything I wrote got through then. The short version is:
> there are many many other North American cities with directional acronym
> suffixes in their street names which follow the expanded name rule. So far
> nothing has been said that convinces me that Alberta is different from
> those places besides "we locals personally prefer seeing abbreviations on
> our maps" which as someone correctly said is a rendering concern not a
> database concern.
>
> I'm being very sincere and serious in what I write: not sarcastic, maybe
> just using hyperbole to make a point.
> On Dec 16, 2022, 10:20 PM -0600, Michael Stark <michael60634 at gmail.com>,
> wrote:
>
> 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
> <https://mailto:bradley.will@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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