[Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[am12]

I understand that this is a collaborative project, where standards are as
much defined by what somebody decides to do as anything else.  Neither the
wiki pages nor mailing list opinions (or votes) are definitive mandates. 
Given that, I'll toss my opinion out here.

> I'm saying that abbreviations are part of every day life, and locals know

> what to abbreviate and what not to. 

Sure, according to their local usage, which will be inconsistent with local
usage in other places.  What one local thinks is an obvious abbreviation
usage because "everyone knows it" will not be obvious to a map user from
elsewhere.

> How does commercial text-2-speech handle this? 

Unabbreviated, better-structured data.

> Can we 
> agree for now that, with appropriate local knowledge, it will be
acceptable
> to strip just these prefixes out of the name tag into another tag? 

Supplemental tags are great, but don't remove it from the name tag. 
Accepted OSM usage is the "name" tag is the complete full name.  There are
other variations like "local_name" or "alt_name" for the shortened version.

>  There would have to be both a "Something XYZ" and a "Something 
> ABC" in the same general area for you to get lost. 

Apparently you don't have many of these in your local area so you don't
seem too concerned about it.  My local area?  I have them, and it's a pain.

>  Multiply this by the 
> already small percentage of both ABC and XYZ being uncommon
abbreviations, 
> and you have a really small set.

And keeping unabbreviated data still eliminates this problem completely.

To me, it's pretty simple: you can go from more data to less easily (full
to abbreviated), but when you extrapolate backwards from less to more you
will lose somewhere.

Remember the mantra about "don't tag for the renderer"?  It's there for a
reason.  OSM, in philosophy, is not about creating a pretty map.  It is
about creating an underlying map data set, and creating a pretty map is one
of the key uses of it, but not the only one.  Printing abbreviations is a
job for the renderer.  

I understand the feeling that "I can't change the renderer myself, but I
can change the data entry myself, so that's the right thing for me to do". 
But it still doesn't make it the best solution.  Let's make the data as
clear and unambiguous as possible, and if the renderer needs fixing, work
on it there.

That's my free opinion, worth every penny :-)

- Alan Millar