[OSM-talk] Name Finder and abbreviations

[David Earl]

On 01/12/2007 22:40, Rob Reid wrote:
> Name Finder has a growing list abbreviations known and those it supports 
> here <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Name_finder:Abbreviations>.
> 
> The Naming Conventions section on the Editing Standards and Conventions 
> page 
> <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Editing_Standards_and_Conventions> 
> currently suggests not using abbreviations until a standard table is 
> available.
> 
> I realise the conventions page may be out of date regarding this and am 
> happy to update it but wanted to check the current state of play 
> regarding abbreviations first.
> 
> Are we ok to use the abbreviations currently supported by Name Finder?
> Can they be used in all 'name' tags or just a subset (eg highway and place)?
> Is there any other search applications or tools that will be affected by 
> abbreviations?

Nearly all the US data from TIGER seems to use abbreviations, so de 
facto I think the answer is yes. Quite a lot of people have also used 
abbreviations in manual mapping as well, despite the exhortation not to.

Personally, I think it looks neater to use the full name, but the trade 
off is not having room to display the name in shorter streets. Like 
tags, I guess it is up to you!

If a renderer wants a consistent style, it is no doubt free to contract. 
In principle it could expand but that is a much harder problem (consider 
Saint vs Street, and whether Str should go to Straße (DE) or Straat 
(NL)). To me that's a strong argument for doing things in full, but it 
only works if everyone does that, and that is already not true for most 
of the data. (It would also make text-to-voice easier, but same applies).

David