[OSM-talk] Name Finder and abbreviations

[Andrew MacKinnon]

> 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.

For the TIGER and AND data we already have this information so it
could be added easily (fairly easily anyway). For other data I think
that it would be possible to create a bot that parses the street name
data and separates the full name into its appropriate parts; it would
need to understand multiple languages and it would need to flag any
ambiguous cases for human review.