[Talk-us-massachusetts] Import of MassGIS addresses -- on converting names from UPPER to Title cases

[Greg Troxel]

Yury Yatsynovich <yury.yatsynovich at gmail.com> writes:

> Another comment on the title() function -- if in QGIS this function works
> the same way as in Python, then some extra problems will be created not
> only for names like "McNamara Street", but also for names like "YMCA
> Street", "Oscar's Way" and "72nd Street"...
> Overall, I found around 800 named highways (except 'path', 'track',
> 'footway', 'cycleway' and 'service') in MA for which name!=name.title()
> (mostly, those names contain numbers or possessive adjectives, but in some
> cases there are errors  like "Country club road" instead of "Country Club
> Road"):
> https://mega.nz/#!H8l31QRb!al64XcgeYH78CchBGiT1axjs4c-ijixm2fNmA3Koa_g

I think it would be nice if we are able to make the import process run
as a program that can operate without a human using a mouse, so that we
can have it scripted in a git repository and run the code repeatedly
until we are really 100% happy with the output.  Getting an import truly
right is quite hard, and this approach worked well for the buildings.

This does mean setting up postgis, but that isn't hard.

We should be able to do case matching with existing streets in the OSM
database, which would help with downcasing things that should have a
second capital.