[OSM-talk] TIGER / Mapnik suggestion

[David Earl]

On 06/09/2007 04:23, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 22:46 -0400, Andrew MacKinnon wrote:
>> On 05/09/07, D Tucny <d at tucny.com> wrote:
>>> It's also just struck me that none of the abbreviations in the TIGER data
>>> have been expanded... i.e Avenue is Ave, Street is St, Drive is Dr, Highway
>>> is Hwy, I'm guessing Pky is Parkway or something... This doesn't seem to
>>> follow the standard of not using abbreviations in the data...
>> I'm not sure whether we should be doing this. It might add errors to
>> the data, since certain abbreviations have several meanings (e.g. St =
>> Street or Saint). Also, it makes it plainly obvious to editors which
>> OSM data has not yet been edited.
> 
> OK, shall we just delete all of the TIGER data, then? ;)
> 
> Seriously, we got the data right from the census bureau.  If they use
> "St", we use "St".  We probably don't even have the data to tell whether
> it is Saint or Street to begin with.
> 
> I'd be happy to implement any sane suggestions for fixing this.  Any
> ideas?

If it helps, the name finder resolves these differences - it will find 
the street as "St James St", "Saint James St", "St James Street" or 
"Saint James Street". It includes Hwy, but not Pwy at present, though if 
you add it to the table of abbreviations on the Name finder wiki page or 
as a Trac report it will get incorporated in due course.

BTW, I noticed that looking at the tail of the latest planet the last 
few entries don't have names at all, just highway=residential and some 
tiger: tags.

David