[Talk-us] Fixing TIGER street name abbreviations

[Toby Murray]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 7:14 PM, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:
>
> On Apr 30, 2012 5:00 PM, "David Litke" <dwlitke at comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> I just did a few manual TIGER reviews in JOSM and got a validation warning
>> that words like Street and Avenue were abbreviated as St and Ave. So I
>> wonder if this is considered something that needs to be fixed?
>
> Yes.  Rule one of abbreviations:  Don't do it!
>
>> If so, shouldn't it be easy to somehow do a batch global update?
>
> There have been some limited automated expansions, though they can be
> problematic, because abbreviations can mean many possible things.  Expanding
> abbreviations requires a bit of a human touch.  Creating abbreviations in
> the renderer when so desired, not so much.


If by "limited" you mean "half the country" :)

Yes, there was a TIGER name expansion bot that ran from the west coast
to about the Mississippi. I believe It was stopped after some
complaints about it not handling some situations correctly. But I
would probably be in favor of trying to complete it.

Related: http://ksmapper.blogspot.com/2011/05/main-attraction.html

Toby