[Talk-us] name expansion bot (Re: Imports information on the wiki)

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 18 February 2012 00:43, TC Haddad <tchaddad at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:
>> Sounds like a problem for the renderer to solve.  It's possible for
>> renderers to easily create abbreviations when full words are not desired,
>> but impossible for automated translation and renderers to expand
>> abbreviations accurately.
>>
>
> I *guess*, but that seems unrealistic expectation to put on GPS hardware
> manufacturers. Particularly if name expansion is inappropriate in one town,
> but perfectly appropriate in another, and usual practice is to load a large
> area (like a whole state or region) into a GPS device. How woud a device
> renderer know to even try to distinguish across community lines?
>
> From the user perspective it would be nicer if the names in the data set
> correspond to the actual street sign names. In Portland the street name is
> "Tillamook" and if I am on "NE Tillamook" that just helps me know the
> quadrant of town. "Northeast" on it's own doesn't tell me anything if I
> can't see the rest of the street name.
>
> This example feels more like "tag for reality", vs "tag for the renderer"
> argument, and the short prefixes feel more like reality in Portland, but
> maybe that's just me...
>
> I do see the value if text-to-speech is the real reason this was done
> though.

I think the other benefit is the consistency.  If you decide to
abbreviate in some areas, skip prefixes in other areas, use full words
in yet other areas, the edit wars are never going to end.  I don't see
much value in following the street signs too closely because those are
a very specific use case, where, depending most likely only on someone
in highways management and the manufacturer of the signage AND
circumstances like there being only a limited space to mount the signs
at some crossings, segments of the name can be skipped, abbreviated,
reordered.  There's no requirement that the signage be consistent
along a single street.  In the end it has little to do with what
people call the street.

I also want state, for the record, that the name expansion I ran over
the western states, in general should have dealt with distinguishing
between Saints/States/Streets, single letter streets, and other
ambiguities correctly.  There were cases where it failed for various
reasons (e.g. poor metadata in TIGER) but in general it worked fine.
There were also cases in the first two states I worked on, where the
script had a bug that I fixed only after uploading the first changeset
and had to send a second correcting changeset.  The script has also
flagged a number of cases as too ambiguous and those I dealt with
manually.  Some errors surely still remain.  But all in all the
technical side of the name expansion should not be a problem.

Cheers