On 17 February 2018 at 00:03, OSM Volunteer stevea <stevea...@softworkers.com> wrote: > On Feb 16, 2018, at 2:56 PM, Jarek Piórkowski <ja...@piorkowski.ca> wrote: >> With "street" in a street name, it's clear to most everyone that Pine St is >> an abbreviation and Pine Street is the correct unabbreviated Canadian >> English version. It is not clear to me that "Saint Catharines" is the >> correct unabbreviated version of the city's name. In fact it looks incorrect >> to me. > > Thank you, Jarek. However, I politely disagree that your logic of "it's > clear to most everyone that Pine St is an abbreviation..." holds up for > software logic (even as it might "to most everyone.") This is > well-established and the reasoning behind OSM's policy I noted previously.
Hi Steve, Thanks for drawing the distinction. I think that automatic software manipulation of names (whether in OSM or elsewhere) is necessarily fraught with problems. It must be done carefully and would be best done on a limited set of fields. There are too many exceptions and unusual values to handle fully automatically. The series of articles "things programmers believe about names", "things programmers believe about addresses" come to mind. It makes some sense in Canadian English street names, which are 1) largely standardized and 2) by convention agglutinative - they have prefixes and suffixes and so on. Thus it might be desirable to replace "Pine Street" with "Pine St" or "Saint Clair Avenue West" with "St. Clair Ave W" for rendering or presentation in short fields. Even there, great care must be taken, or - to use a common example of a "weird" street name - "Avenue Road" might be incorrectly reduced to "Ave Rd". In St. Catharines there is a "South Service Road" which can be abbreviated to "S Service Rd", but also a "South Drive" which might make sense as "South Dr" but not as "S Drive". In Niagara-on-the-Lake there is a "East & West Line", which I invite any algorithm to make sense of. (I specify "Canadian English" as I'm not familiar with Canadian French names or with English conventions elsewhere - and that's before getting into areas with bilingual names.) As in the example given by others, the spelling is important to the cities of Saint John and St. John's. IMHO this should not be automatically modified by software. Thus we shouldn't change names that are correct for the sake of software. --Jarek _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
