[Talk-us] Imports information on the wiki

Mike N niceman at att.net
Mon Jan 2 23:01:18 GMT 2012


Continued from tagging...

On 1/2/2012 11:40 AM, Martijn van Exel wrote:
 > What makes you think that the current common opinion is against
 > automatic expansion?

   Mostly because of customary resistance to automatic imports, which is 
rooted in bad imports.   Josh has noted in Tagging that it could give a 
false impression of quality to others - I don't agree because I've never 
considered an expanded name a measure of quality or synonymous with the 
removal of the "tiger:reviewed=no" flag.

 > What in particular were the complaints made against the fixbot?
   Some of it was by finding the few obscure cases that don't yield to 
automation:     The city of St Louis has several cases of
   "St Louis Street"
   "Saint Louis Street"
  style duplication.   The streets are physically not connected and you 
must use the correct naming convention to go to the right place.
Also -  "St Park Rd"; is this "Saint Park Road" or "State Park Road"?


 > Can/should the fixbot be improved to take them into account?
    I believe we could let it run if everyone agrees on the safe expansions.
      * Rd ->* Road for example.

   And despite it being a bot, the author put in some significant block 
of time to review each upload for correctness and marked many errors 
that were clearly rooted in TIGER data.

  There is some minor discrepancy between TIGER abbreviations and common 
street sign / official USPS abbreviations also: Pky -> Pkwy = Parkway

 > especially if a fixbot was
 > only run on half the country, as was the case with the name expansion.

  Ironically, having a split country situation forces data consumers to 
handle both the abbreviated and expanded case (Mainly Nominatum today). 
   Even if the entire US data is expanded, that situation will continue 
to exist as new mappers arrive and have never dealt with anything but 
abbreviations on maps, street signs, or addresses.   They may even 
re-abbreviate expanded names.   Otherwise, we would need bots to run 
behind them and clean up new contributions to make them usable.  Or 
waste other mapper's time to do it manually.   But manually entered road 
names cannot be automatically expanded, since those will very seldom if 
ever have directional  hints like TIGER data has.

   Nominatum should still continue to handle both cases.  Although it 
has been said that map renderering is the place to abbreviate the full 
name, no map renderer currently does this as far as I know.  If there is 
ever a custom US style OSM renderer, that would be a logical feature.




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