The issue with abbreviations is very muddy. BUT it has been said many time that we do not want to abbreviate where possible. There are several reasons.
- Clarity! The abbreviations are just that, they mean the full word, and are spoken that way, but written and displayed as the abbreviation.
Since the cities and postal services publish the abbreviated names in documents and on signs, and people use they routinely that way in their own writing, and (in my experience) rarely speak the suffix except where it matters (in UT, DC, Atlanta), I disagree that expanding them adds any clarity. Everyone knows what they mean. If anything, we're making an assumption by expanding them, since we don't "know" that a leading Dr means Doctor, or St means Saint - we can only assume. I think we should tag what's on the ground and leave it to the specific case of accessibility and navigation tools to expand as necessary - this is the way commercial tools already work, and it's not hard for them to do.
- It is a LOT easier to abbreviate from the full word than to go the other way. Otherwise this scripting expansion thing would be easy and error free.
Slightly easier, maybe. Significantly - I don't think so. I think people aren't thinking about the problem very well, honestly. The fact that "St Something St" keeps coming up as being ambiguous is silly to me. Obviously, there's a difference between the meaning of St in front and in back. To design an sort of expansion logic without that basic concept is silly.
- As mentioned it makes use of the data easier, especially for searching, and text to speech.
Searching? Why? People are more likely to search for Something Blvd than Something Boulevard. Text to speech, yes, per above.
There are reasons commercial databases and maps have separate fields for number, direction prefix, name, type, and direction suffix, and use standard abbreviations in all but the number and name field. I don't know why we are trying to re-invent the wheel as an octagon (or maybe square :) ).
Yes there can be errors with going from abbreviations to the full words. A reason for doing this as said, do it once with review instead of in every program that uses the data.
Why not just publish hashes of the correct expansions in each language for the consumers to use. Soon after they start to be used, they will rarely change.
But those errors are small in comparison to the number of abbreviated way names and can be corrected later as found just like any other tagging error. Most of those errors are going to be on names that are unclear to begin with.
They are _very_ hard to find. I still stumble across balrog-kun expansion errors, years later. And I look at a _lot_ of street names in detail compared to the average mapper.
Alan Mintz <[email protected]>
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