[Talk-us] More road name expansion thoughts

Dale Puch dale.puch at gmail.com
Mon Jul 21 23:55:06 UTC 2014


I see the reason for all this work is to make the data un-ambigious.  To
that end expanding all the contractions.  This is needed for text to
speech, consistent searches, and probably a few other issues.  From the
expanded data names can be contracted a lot easier without mistakes.

Raw data: northwest 15th drive
spoken data: northwest fifteenth drive
Map data: NW 15th Dr.

I don't think we need to store 2 or 3 copies for 99.9% of the names, but
some will break the rules the rest follow and need some kind of "don't
expand" flag or alt name(s) stored because of that.


Dale Puch


On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 9:45 AM, Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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