[Talk-us] More road name expansion thoughts

[Serge Wroclawski]

Hi folks,

Received lots more comments on list and off list- a robust discussion
about data uniformity vs localism, words vs signage, the importance of
rendering (be it visual or auditory), etc.

These are really interesting and important topics, but I think we're going to
get bogged down if we try to address it all at once, so here's what
I'm suggesting:

1. The issue raised about DC contractions is clearly one where people
   have strong views. I think it deserves its own
   discussion. So if the DC folks want to discuss DC's road expansion
   separately, I say go for it. It wouldn't be very hard to contract
   the names there based on the same TIGER tags that we used to expand
   them. I don't personally think that's what we should do, but I'm
   happy to participate in the discussion.

2. I haven't seen anyone on this list disagree with the OSM general
   method of expanding road identifiers (Street, Lane, Boulevard,
   etc.). So we can agree on that and I think move forward with the
   general proposal around name expansion.

3. There seems to be interest in automated edits happening on a
   continuing basis. I'm cautiously in favor. I think it's something
   that if we do, we need to do very carefully, as a community, with
   lots of input and community oversight.

4. I think there's some really good discussion about
   tagging. Utilizing short_name might be a good idea. I also like the
   idea sign_name tag. If you build a routing engine, you might want
   to show the sign name as it appears on the street, for example,
   which isn't always going to be how one might think it is. There
   will inevitably will be some odd exceptions, but that's the nature
   of this kind of data.

   By the same token, I'd really love to see us have pronunciation
   data associated with road names to deal with the fact that a
   name doesn't always get pronounced how you think it does. For
   example, "Houston" is pronounced one way for the city "Hew-ston"
   but the street in NYC is pronounced "How-ston". It'd be great if
   we have those exception pronunciations in OSM.

   So it might be interesting and worthwhile to explore some of these
   ideas on a new thread.

In a moment of over-sharing, I'm probably going to postpone any work
on this for a few weeks. It turns out that a surgery I had needs to be
re-done, so that's happening Friday- I'll be out for another seven to
ten days after that in recovery. Sadly that's on top of the ~3 weeks of
recovery I've just come out of, so my schedule is very backed
up. There's nothing in this discussion which strikes me as time
critical, so I see it as more time to discuss and contemplate.

- Serge