[Talk-us] Street Naming Conventions

[am12]

>> Some of the examples comma separated into the 4 field format:
>> South, ,1000 East, Street

> Paul Johnson mentioned on IRC today the case of East Doctor Martin
> Luther King, Junior Boulevard, which wouldn't work with this schema

I don't think *storing* them as comma separated was the suggested scheme;
it was just data samples in the email.  Storing them could/would be done as
4 fields, like TIGER.  In which case this street name works just fine.

> I think the tag like
> name= should really be consistent so tools can rely on it without
> adapting to every single country.  

Definitely.  If implemented, the 4-field breakdown should be in addition to
the name= field.  

> As for the different segments of
> the name, there are already fields for them which we inherited from
> TIGER, you'll find the "middle" of the name is unmodified in the
> tiger:base_name= tag, the cardinal direction in
> tiger:directional_prefix= and tiger:directional_suffix and the feature
> type (Street, Ave etc) in type:name_type.

Sure.  I think the suggestion was really just to take that structure and
make it available/standard for all streets, not just tiger imports in the
tiger namespace.

So the example above would be

directional_prefix=East
base_name=Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior
name_type=Boulevard
directional_suffix=
name=East Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior Boulevard

Is it redundant?  Mostly.  Is it maximally informative and flexible?  Yes.

I wonder if all areas that use a directional suffix put them after the name
type ("Maple Street SouthEast"), or if some put them before the name type
("Maple SouthEast Street")?  In which case, the full name is not actually
redundant but holds proper ordering info not in the separated fields.

- Alan