[OSM-talk] Name Finder and abbreviations

[Karl Newman]

On Dec 2, 2007 2:45 AM, David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:
> 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 I realise the conventions page may be out of date regarding this and am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).

I realize it's quite late in the game for this, but it would be nice
to have fully componentized names: prefix, base_name, type, suffix
(i.e., NW Main Street would be prefix=NW, base_name=Main,
type=Street). Then the renderers could do more intelligent things with
the names without having to guess, such as creating abbreviations
without having to determine if it's a type or part of the base name
(isn't there a Street Street somewhere?), or showing less of the name
at lower zooms (i.e., in Garmin GPS maps, you can limit the parts of
the full name that are shown at lower zooms).

This would be a nice addition to the standard "name" tag.