[Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

Apollinaris Schoell aschoell at gmail.com
Thu Apr 22 16:40:42 BST 2010


On 21 Apr 2010, at 17:12 , andrzej zaborowski wrote:
> 
> 
> The signs are posted there by authorities so this is similar to having
> access to a tiny piece of a map or database made by these authorities.
> For maps people usually agreed on this list that we don't trust them.
> 

are you saying authorities are wrong and we should correct what they are doing and follow tiger or USPS standards instead?

> 
>>> 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?
> 
> Only as an inditaction, I spent a while doing that whenever I visited
> a place and at least another two people on IRC asked if there was any
> way to do it automatically, in JOSM or otherwise and we tried to find
> a way to do it in JOSM or with simple regexes on the .osm file but it
> seemed a much better idea to do it consistently for the whole area and
> according to actual documentation that accompanies TIGER.
> 

I am impressed  3 people agreed on this process! 


>> 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?
> 
> Well one good rule is if there should be any rules then they should be global.
> 

no not at all. US is very different in many aspects and has to be done different. several countries don't use abbrev names on maps or addresses. Most street names don't even have a st/ave/blvd/ct … postfix at all and so there is no reason to even discuss this topic. And in case they use abbrev it's only when there is a need to shorten. But all official use will be expanded. But in US it looks very much it's the opposite. abbrev is the standard use model and expanded name is the exception


> You could surely change the wiki but it's a conclusion that a lot of
> people individually seem to come to so I'm sure you wouldn't even need
> a bot before someone would add a phrase to that effect.

the wiki often has as much agreement as your decision to run this bot. in case you didn't see the irony in my comment again in detail. the wiki isn't a reference in any way. It's just a document and not any better than a message on this list or on IRC or the hard fact of existing data in the planet. everyone can change it, very few people care about the wiki except in germany and it's completely out of sync with real data in planet.

> 
> Cheers





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