[Talk-us] Feature proposal: proposed expanded address tagging scheme for US

Steven Johnson sejohnson8 at gmail.com
Wed Nov 21 21:16:31 GMT 2012


Hi all,

Two things:

First, thanks Mark, for a very useful suggestion. I need to think about it,
but I think it has merit from the standpoint of streamlining the address
assignment process, as well as keeping address points in sync with their
associated streets.

Second, Richard, please see Carl's post which talks about the proposal from
the standpoint of emergency services. Carl could likely say what the pros &
cons are of splitting the tags vs loading everything in the addr:street tag.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone,

-- SEJ
-- twitter: @geomantic
-- skype: sejohnson8

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." --
Einstein



On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net>wrote:

> ok, thanks, carl. this helps. i'm working on an emergency services related
> project
> right now and it's helpful to learn about these things.
>
> the next question is this. supposing we implement Steven's proposal, how
> does
> this help in emergency services mapping projects, that is, what does this
> breakout
> facilitate for us?
>
> richard
>
>
> On 11/20/12 10:05 PM, Carl Anderson wrote:
>
>> All,
>>
>> This proposal is a good thing, provided that it does not deprecate current
>> tagging uses.
>>
>> >From my experiences in emergency services (911), emergency management
>> (FEMA
>> and State/County EMA), and location finding I find that it is often very
>> important to know what the colloquial core phrase of an address is.
>>
>> A "Colloquial core phrase" is something we all use everyday.  We shorten
>> names down to a useful, but still meaningful, core.
>> If I were to say that I was at 14th and K, many of my DC friends would
>> know
>> that I was at the intersection of 14 St NW and K St NW.
>> My friends who are not familiar with DC could guess the location given a
>> bit of prompting.
>>
>> In easy cases it is easy to determine the "colloquial core phrase" of an
>> address.
>> Sometimes however, it is not easy to guess the correct local use for a
>> street name or address.
>>
>> For instance my friends in Alpharetta, GA all know that North Point Mall
>> Blvd is not the North version of Point Mall Blvd, but instead is the Blvd
>> at North Point Mall.  My friends farther away from Alpharetta, GA probably
>> don't know this.
>>
>> Additionally, many times I have seen St. Lo Dr. mangled by well
>> intentioned
>> people into Street Lo Drive or once and a while into Street Lo Doctor.  Of
>> course Saint-Lô is is a well known place in France with a name derived
>> from
>> Saint Laud.
>> Consider how often people mangle the intersection roads "Boulevard" and
>> "Boulevard Drive" in Atlanta, GA.  It is about even how well intentioned
>> people convert both names into one of the two valid choices.
>>
>> Steven's proposal creates a mechanism for local knowledge and local
>> colloquial use to be added into OSM.  In turn this data, when present,
>> will
>> allow people who interact with the public to better understand the intent
>> of the public in a more precise fashion.
>>
>> The parsing steps move the bits that are not part of the core into well
>> known tags that can be unambiguously dealt with.
>> The unambiguous aspect is equally important as abbreviation usage is often
>> lossy.  For instance some US jurisdictions use BL as an abbreviation for
>> Boulevard and others use BL for Bluff.  (In the emergency services world
>> hilarity does not ensue).  If OSM had such names as "Braided Blanket
>> Bluff"
>> in the proposed tagging scheme
>>
>>
>> If we were to use the proposal as additional tags to the current existing
>> tags people could add to OSM data to the limit of their local knowledge
>> and
>> when they knew the common local usage could, correctly, completely and
>> unambiguously fill out the parsed tags that Steven has proposed.
>>
>> C.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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