[Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Apollinaris Schoell]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:36 PM, andrzej zaborowski <balrogg at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 20 April 2010 05:24, Apollinaris Schoell <aschoell at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Sounds a lot like the IMO ill-considered road name expansion that was
> >> apparently agreed upon by a small group of people without input from the
> >> majority of active mappers whose work has been damaged.
> >
> > agreed, no idea why this was done. it's a change without much benefit but
> lot's of damage.
>
> Where's damage in that -- is it in that you can now read the name out
> without checking the documentation for what that funny string means in
> that particular database that is TIGER?  You can now also write an
> intelligent search engine that will understand both forms, you can
> pipe the names through text-to-speach and do a lot more.
>
>
there is damage by doing it wrong, others have pointed to it already.

I am not deep enough into the history of the abbreviations used and who
defined them. But I am pretty sure there is a lot of errors.
- in the city I live there is no street sign with street, avenue, boulevard,
.... and even more surprising there are no abbreviations either. osm
principle is to map what's on the ground. So tiger import is definitely
wrong and expanding the names is also wrong. on the other hand postal
address usually use it in one or the other form so it's not completely
fiction.
- many geocding engines do not find expanded names. even google doesn't in
many cases. To me it looks like nearly anyone doesn't use the expanded name
at all. So my question is is the expanded name really the correct name?
- all rendered maps use the abbrev names
- only text to speech uses full name

now all applications except text to speech have to change, where is the
advantage?
in summary is replacing something "wrong" with something else and still
"wrong" a good idea?




> The reason it was done with a script is that doing it manually was
> taking a lot of time and mappers were spending that time doing this
> instead of going out mapping.  And it's always been on the wiki about
> not using abbreviated names, even when the original import was done,
> ignoring this.
>

can you provide any stats that mappers spent time on it instead doing
anything better?
Is the wiki any better as a reference than what is in the osm DB? I could
change the wiki and then will someone write a bot to reverse it? Is the wiki
written with the situation in US in mind?

I am not entirely opposing the bot.
But it hasn't been communicated there is no consensus that and how this
should be done. osm is a community project and not the playground for one
following some wiki page advise.
When Frederick came up with the idea of deleting useless tags of tiger
import it was discussed and refined until it was what mappers agreed. there
was not a single voice opposing it.
shoot first ask later is really bad practice



>
> Cheers
>
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