[Talk-us] Tidying up TIGER data

Paul Johnson baloo at ursamundi.org
Thu Jun 4 22:48:20 BST 2009


Dave Hansen wrote:

> Consider: "St. Helens St.".  There are also plenty of semi-mistakes or
> weird abbreviations in TIGER that appear to be mistakes.  I wouldn't be
> surprised to see "Saint Street" entered somewhere as
> 
> 	name: "St."
> 	type: "St."
> 
> We don't want to make that "Street Street".  That makes it even
> worse. :)

I'm not sure corner cases are a showstopping reason not to bulk-fix this
anyway (at least not for St. abbreviations; cardinals are another matter).

Having most ways correct would make a partially-fixed, partially-borked
name more visible than a completely borked name in a sea of borked
names.  "Street Helens Street" to "Saint Helens Street" would be an
obvious and easy enough fix a potlatch user could do it, but it would
solve the bigger problem, such as street names that were overzealously
abbreviated by TIGER (such as Court Street in Salem, which appears
unfixed from TIGER in TeleAtlas and Navteq maps as "Ct St", and
occasionally has confused tourists looking for "Conneticut Street" or
literally "CT Street" and occasionally less common expansions when
they're navigating by hand with a poorly-sourced paper map and a
complete lack of inductive reasoning).


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