[Talk-us] Fixing TIGER street name abbreviations

[Richard Welty]

On 4/30/12 10:35 PM, Mike N wrote:
> On 4/30/2012 10:24 PM, Toby Murray wrote:
>>   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.
>
>  I would agree - there's no point in asserting that we have to spend 
> time manually expanding everything, it's not adding value to the map 
> data.   And the bot is probably more accurate than a human, limited 
> only by the accuracy of the base TIGER data - think of all the 
> possible typos on streeet, avenve, and boulavard.
from what i gather, there is more than one expansion bot, and they're 
not all the same.
at least, i saw some incorrectly expanded names in North-Central Iowa 
last year, and everyone involved
in the bots that spoke up disclaimed knowledge of that particular 
example of bad expansions.

so there are bots and there are bots, and i'd feel happer about them if 
i sensed more devotion to
quality assurance. after all, if you don't expand automagically, you 
have unwanted abbreviations that may not
get expanded for years if you do expand, you may introduce errors in 
place of abbreviations that may go
undetected for years.

richard