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

[W B]

I'm standing in the worst airline terminal in the world at the moment so I won't be exhaustive, but the short answer is, it doesn't matter. This is a global tagging policy akin to avoiding uppercase names like SAN FRANCISCO or tagging things as motorways even though you and I might call them freeways, expressways, or speedways. The OSM project is first and foremost a database, and so normalization is key to the data being parsed and understood. We don't even abbreviate St. Louis, and the *city charter* abbreviates it. You need a compelling reason *not* to, not the other way around.

As for "fixing software," others have talked at length about how difficult it is to un-compress things like "St" (Saint or Street), "E" (a lettered street or East), etc. It's a very easy and common rendering problem to shorten words, it's a hard problem with no good solutions to unshorten them.

I'm going to stop responding because again I have no dog in this fight beyond, I guess, being the developer behind one of the first OSM ecosystem pull requests to attempt to speak street names via TTS (which I guess counts for a lot actually) -- I simply invite people to present further reasons why Alberta should be an exception to the name tagging policy ( https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:name#Values ) and if they're truly exceptional and represent community consensus then document it. Again I only spoke up because so far none of the justifications are actually unique so far. If TTS pronounces your streets "one hundred four street ess eee" and you don't like it, it'll be in your power to change.
On Dec 18, 2022, 3:12 PM -0800, Hoser AB <hoserab1 at gmail.com>, wrote:
> If "NW" can be (and is, every day) expanded to be understood as "Northwest", why is it that "NW" can't be reasonably understood to mean "Northwest" without having to be expanded?
>
> I understand Minh's previous points about text-to-speech engines not being able to handle it well, with edge cases like "Avenue S" being "Avenue Ess" not "Avenue South", but who are all these other OSM data consumers for whom NW/NE/SW/SE is "broken and wrong"?
>
> If this ain't your first rodeo, surely you can then explain to all us slack-jawed yokels why we need to write out a simple two-letter abbreviation that is ubiquitously used and universally understood to mean ordinal directions? Beyond the TTS issues Minh brought up I can't fathom why it would make any difference to any other data consumer to keep them abbreviated. In fact if anything I would think most data consumers would want to keep it abbreviated, given every single existing municipal and provincial database, every street sign, every home address on a Christmas card, every office address on a business card, every storefront address on an advertisement, and every colloquial use between every Tom, Dick and Harry uses NW/NE/SW/NE. At what point is blindly following an OSM policy itself becoming "tagging for the data consumer"? If every data input going into the map has to be unabbreviated just so "the renderer" can abbreviate it again on the "consumer" side... why are we going to the trouble of fudging data in the first place?
>
> You wrote earlier, "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'," and ironically you seem blind to the way that you're making that very same argument for "unabbreviation". You wrote earlier, "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," but why is it that your software's limitations are my problem? Write better software, software that isn't so stupid that it can't suss out SW = Southwest (= SW).
>
>
> On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 2:52 PM W B <bradley.will at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.
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