[Talk-us] Fixing TIGER street name abbreviations

[Nathan Edgars II]

On 5/1/2012 1:23 PM, Anthony wrote:
> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 1:18 PM, Nathan Edgars II<neroute2 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On 5/1/2012 12:59 PM, Anthony wrote:
>>>
>>> Automatically expanding abbreviations is a terrible idea.  If an
>>> abbreviation is unambiguous, then it can be expanded during the
>>> preprocessing step.  If, on the other hand, it is ambiguous, then you
>>> are turning ambiguous data into incorrect data, which certainly
>>> diminishes the data.
>>
>>
>> Not quite. We have various TIGER tags that break the name into pieces, and
>> allow automated expansion where the name field may be ambiguous. (Though
>> occasionally these tags are wrong.)
>
> I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with.  Either it is unambiguous
> (due to TIGER tags or whatever), and therefore can be done during the
> preprocessing step.  Or it is ambiguous, and needs human
> intervention/review.
>
The TIGER tags are not exactly standard OSM tags that belong in the 
database. Better that we get rid of them at the same time as we expand 
abbreviations.