[Talk-us] Fixing TIGER street name abbreviations

Anthony osm at inbox.org
Fri May 11 18:39:39 BST 2012


On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Minh Nguyen <mxn at 1ec5.org> wrote:
> On 2012-05-11 6:45 AM, Anthony wrote:
>> The only way to capture the full information is to have additional
>> tags telling you what the base is.  And if you do that, abbreviating
>> or not abbreviating doesn't matter.
>
>
> That's similar to how the tiger:* tags are structured, and it's the subject
> of a proposal on the wiki:
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Directional_Prefix_%26_Suffix_Indication

Well, yes, we should find a way to separate out the parts of the name.
 In addition to facilitating abbreviation, it also facilitates
translation.  We also should include pronunciation information.

But first we need street relations.  It turns out some people already
did research into ways to structure a database which minimizes the
inconsistencies we currently have in the OSM database.  It's called
database normalization.

As it turns out, the current method of putting names on ways already
fails to even be in first normal form.  Some ways represent more than
one road.

The solution is to use relations.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Proposed/Street is
somewhat of a good proposal, though I have a little bit of trouble
with the wording.  We shouldn't include "Any Tag that applies to all
parts of the road", but only to those tags which apply to the entire
road as a whole.  In other words, we'd include goods=no if there were
a law saying "no commercial vehicles are allowed on Whatever Parkway",
but not just because all the ways happen to have goods=no tags.



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