[Talk-us] Fixing TIGER street name abbreviations

[Dale Puch]

The issue with abbreviations is very muddy.  BUT it has been said many time
that we do not want to abbreviate where possible.  There are several
reasons.

   - Clarity!  The abbreviations are just that, they mean the full word,
   and are spoken that way, but written and displayed as the abbreviation.  I
   also disagree I have never know anyone that said "whatever A V E"  they do
   not spell it out, they say the word the abbreviation stands for.  Same for
   St, Dr ect.
   - It is a LOT easier to abbreviate from the full word than to go the
   other way.  Otherwise this scripting expansion thing would be easy and
   error free.
   - As mentioned it makes use of the data easier, especially for
   searching, and text to speech.

Yes there can be errors with going from abbreviations to the full words.  A
reason for doing this as said, do it once with review instead of in every
program that uses the data.  But those errors are small in comparison to
the number of abbreviated way names and can be corrected later as found
just like any other tagging error.  Most of those errors are going to be on
names that are unclear to begin with.

People have gotten so gun shy of any automation or imports that I feel they
are actively blocking people trying to do the right thing and a good job.
It is almost to a point I wonder why someone would go thru talking it over
on the list if you get grief for it if you can just quietly start doing
it.  Obviously not what we want.

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 10:56 PM, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:

> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 10:45 PM, Mike N <niceman at att.net> wrote:
> >  But you wouldn't be confused if an stranger came in asking how to get to
> > "Whatever Avenue"?    If not, then there's no problem with the expansion.
>
> Okay, so basically we're ignoring the on-the-ground rule in order to
> map for the renderer.
>
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-- 
Dale Puch
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