[Talk-us] street name expansion thoughts

Toby Murray toby.murray at gmail.com
Tue Nov 27 03:26:30 GMT 2012


On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 7:34 PM, Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us> wrote:
> I've been cleaning up are area of Jackson County, NC and found roads where
> the name expansion algorithm failed to expand all of the abbreviations . For
> example Yellow Bird Br Road.
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=35.36564&lon=-83.24253&zoom=17&layers=M
> (not fixed yet)
>
> I didn't write down the problems thinking at first it was just an
> abnormality.
>
> I think it might be worth while to look at the names in the TIGER database
> for Jackson County NC to see why the names are not being expanded properly.
> I'll try to pull up a list tomorrow to see if it can help improve the
> expansion algorithm.

I assume the Br is supposed to be "Branch"? It seems to just be an
oddity in the TIGER data. The "name" field, where you would see "Main"
for "North Main Street" has the value of "Yellow Bird Br"

It might be because this road seems to have two type suffixes: Branch
and Road. But the TIGER data model only allows for one so they shoved
the first one into the name field. Ideally (IMO) they should have put
"Branch" in its unabbreviated form into the name field. But I guess
that would have been too easy. Have you found very many of these?

I suppose one could try to find abbreviations in the name field... but
that might get messy. At the end of the day, no algorithm can correct
for some of the quirks in the source data so we have to accept some of
the glitches.

Toby



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