[Talk-us] Street Naming Conventions

[Dale Puch]

It would probably be best to have both the 'as displayed' name, and 'as
spoken' in the tags.  Anything else you have to make assumptions that may or
may not be right.
If both are not stored, the next best alternative seems to be having the
full spoken name in the tags, but have seprate prefix(directional), name and
suffix fields.  That way the prefix and suffix can be abbreviated while
leaving the actual name alone where the odd ones might be matched to an
abbreviation.  This wold not cover things like the saint.... prefix  to St.
abbreviation without adding a 4th field  directional, prefix, name, suffix

Personally I like the 3 field, or event the 4 field storage of the name.
Yes that means there is not a single field that has the full name, but I do
not think a lookup and concat of 4 fields vs 1 field is much different in an
indexed database.  Perhaps a DB admin can shed some light on the best
approach from a design and system resources standpoint.

This may be a problem for apps, but if it is the best way to manage the
data, the apps just need to be changed.  And it would not be that hard to
make the programming change if I can figure out how to do it with my limited
knowledge.

Some of the examples comma separated into the 4 field format:
South, ,1000 East, Street
,State, Park, Street
,Saint, Tropez, Street

As per the wiki, the translation to abbreviated names is a program or
renderer issue, but using the USPS (for the US) as a guideline/reference
seems like a good idea.

The other two problems, are converting the existing names and getting
everyone to input the fields correctly.
A bot is always an issue.  There are ways to minimize the problems though.
Start with the easy ones to process automatically.  Probably referencing
external data to assure correct conversions by checking if similar names are
in the same geographic region, and skip any that might get mixed up.  Flag
those for later bots, or manual correction.

Dale


On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Mike Thompson <miketho16 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have worked with these issues for a number of years in my
> professional life.  We have found that it is better to spell out
> street names.  As Matthias pointed out, it is far easier to convert a
> named that is spelled out to one that is abbreviated than the other
> way around.  I have seen far too many problems with going the other
> way.  Cases where "Dr" was expanded to "Doctor", "St" was expanded to
> "Saint", etc (and vise versa) when that was not the intention.  By
> spelling out the names we make it easier for the application consuming
> the data (e.g. a renderer) to make its own decision as to whether to
> abbreviate or not.  If we use abbreviations, we lock the application
> into using abbreviations (and using the same abbreviations), or at the
> very least, make it difficult to do otherwise.
>
> Having said that, I think it is a bad idea to have a bot going through
> and attempting to expand abbreviations.
>
> Mike
>
> On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 11:27 AM, am12 <am12 at bolis.com> wrote:
> >
> >>What do people think?
> >
> > It is easy (I think) to know what "St", "Ave", and "Blvd" mean at the end
> > of the name.  The rest of them aren't always clear.  I recently had to
> > figure out what a "Lp" was ("Loop" - this one was new to me).
> >
> > I used to live on "Southbay Drive".  I would get mail addressed as "South
> > Bay Drive", even though there were no north/south address prefixes used
> > anywhere nearby.  The strangest was when I would get mail addressed as "S
> > Bay Drive".  Fortunately there was no Bay Drive in my zipcode.
> >
> > - Alan
> >
> >
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