[Talk-us] Fixing TIGER street name abbreviations

[Mike N]

On 5/1/2012 9:10 AM, Richard Weait wrote:
> The previous bots were shouted down and all took the approach of
> finding things to change, then changing them.  This sounds like a
> similar approach.

   I think the one that Andrzej / balrog-kun was running makes the best 
use of hints in the TIGER data.

https://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/applications/utils/import/tiger2osm/expand/expand.py

   It's notable that even this script requires some significant manual 
labor / review associated with each batch processed.

> Is there any benefit to finding the subtle, problematic abbreviations
> and highlighting them for manual intervention?  Sort of an error
> overlay in the OSMI style, that highlights future expansion problems?
> If we find and fix the problem cases first, surely fixing the last rd
> -->  Road batch will be easier and less error prone.

   I don't know that it needs to be done ahead of time.   These cases 
are very few and far between.   And how does automatic analysis find 
that the streets
    St MikeN Street
    Saint MikeN Street

    are really 2 different streets, and must retain their spelling? 
But it would still be good to have a tag that identifies those few cases 
so that they remain untouched by any future bot activities.  In some 
cases, new contributors will change the full name back to abbreviation 
when editing because that's what they're used to seeing.