[OSM-talk] shortened names

Kay Drangmeister kay at drangmeister.net
Wed Jul 27 22:44:38 BST 2011


Am 27.07.2011 19:22, schrieb M∡rtin Koppenhoefer:
>> Am 27.07.2011, 12:01 Uhr, schrieb Richard Fairhurst<richard at systemed.net>:
>>>
>>> every native English speaker would
>>> pronunce St in that context as 'saint'. That, to me, is a pretty
>>> conclusive
>>> argument that we should tag "St".
>
> In Italian "S." can mean "San", "Sant'" and "Santa", "Ss." can mean
> "Santi" and "Santissimo"/"Santissima"/"Santissimi"/"Santissime"
> because you have to care for gender, grammatical number and if the
> name starts with a vowel. I guess dealing automatically with this is
> not completely impossible but it certainly requires some effort (not
> to mention if you wanted to apply different rules for all languages
> that occur in the planet).

That, to me, is a convincing argument to tag the unabbreviated form
and let software (easily) do the abbreviation, instead of tagging
the abbreviation and have software do the (next to impossible) task
to un-abbreviate.

I cannot concur with Richards argument of "native speakers" in that
case. Native speakers (read: humans) have context knowledge that
our software (in the forseeable future) just does not have, and we
want (humans AND) software to deal with our data, don't we?

Cheers,
Kay



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