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

[W B]

I have no authority, I've just been around the OSM block a few times and weighing in as far as what's correct. I also happen to live in a city that has ubiquitous directional suffixes. I'm sorry if my tone comes off more vinegary than sweet, I'm simply advocating for what works.

The wiki does indeed say that local community and ground truth are important. Otherwise we'd be mapping virtual reality and there'd be no local buy in or help! But the wiki has also been very clear about name abbreviation from the beginning: in 2008 the key:name page said in bold, "Do not abbreviate words." Now it says "if a signpost abbreviates the name to save space, but the name can reasonably be spelled out in full, the name=* should also be spelled out in full."

If there's a compelling reason why that policy shouldn't be followed, then great, but "the city's own maps" and the particular naming jurisdiction is still not a unique compelling exception: plenty of governments abbreviate their streets, that doesn't mean that "NW" can't (and isn't, every day) be reasonably expanded out to be understood as Northwest.

I have no authority here, in the end I don't care. But your province's data will be broken and wrong as far as OSM data consumers are concerned, and ultimately it's Albertans who will end up feeling the brunt of it. Again I was initially sympathetic to the local control angle, except that every single argument in favor of an exception is not actually exceptional. North American streets with ubiquitous directional suffixes are nothing new.
On Dec 18, 2022, 12:45 PM -0600, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>, wrote:
> I think it is a basic management technique it is far more effective to catch staff doing something right rather than to criticise them.
>
> OSM depends for the most part on volunteers and they work best in an atmosphere of collaboration.  I think this is one reason why OSM normally defers to local mappers.
>
> In OSM there are regional differences as decided by local mappers.
>
> I suggest you just live with it rather than attempting to impose your views on others.
>
> In this case the municipalities have the responsibility of street naming.  If you look at the City of Calgary's own maps you'll see the NW is quite clearly part of the address.  This is the official name by the official street naming authority.
>
> Are you saying that the city has misspelt all the names?  If so I suggest you take it up with the appropriate Alberta municipalities.
>
> Mapping should be fun this isn't.
>
> Cheerio John
>
> On Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 20:30 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_Maphttps://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ground_truthHopefully 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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