[Talk-us] More road name expansion thoughts

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 9:01 AM, Mikel Maron <mikel.maron at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here in Washington DC, the street names are all suffixed with the quadrant
> (NW, SE, SW, NE) the road lies in. The official names of the streets kept by
> the DC city government all use the contraction. Historically, I could find
> no maps that used the expansion.

The city maps may use the same contractions as TIGER, etc. but we know
they're contractions, which is distinct from being words, so I don't
the city maps as being a reason for changing the way the entire OSM
project handles contractions.

BTW, for anyone who isn't aware, I lived in DC from 1996-2012, which
is both a long time, and also a recent time. I consider myself
essentially a local in this matter.

> For spoken navigation systems, this is probably the easiest situation to
> identify and handle, without ambiguity.

The real issue is trying to standardize the OSM data for data
consumers, which text-to-speech systems will benefit from, but they're
not the only ones.

> OSM maps of DC now just look a bit bizarre.

The MapBox folks seemed to have figued this out US-wide and
re-contract the road names and the directional identifiers. This is a
rendering problem- one which I agree with you 100% that it should be
fixed, not just for directions but also for road identifiers, because
we in the US are used to seeing contractions.

Another proposal I've seen which seemed interesting (though not free
of problems) is the idea of a new tag that was basically the name of
the road exactly as it appears on a road sign.

I agree with you 100% that we should strive for a map that looks
"American" for US map users. The MapBox folks seem to have done it, so
really this is a problem with osm.org's map. Their map is really
British-Euro centric in many ways, and it would really be nice if we
had a good, solid alternative, much like osm.fr. Maybe MapBox can
share some of their style with us, or if not, we have our work cut out
for us, but I'm sure we can do it.

> So I don't recommend we apply this expansion without consideration of
> regional variation. Before any expansion scripts are run, in DC or anywhere,
> the local community needs to be consulted sufficiently.

Can you elaborate on this?

- Serge