As we briefly discussed during the virtual mappy hour last week, I have managed to wrangle some TIGER data and do some automated expansion of abbreviated street names on the TIGER road name tiles. The results can be seen in a new tile layer. You can preview it here: http://tile.osm.osuosl.org/tiles/tiger2012_roads_expanded/preview.html#17/37.79816/-122.24627
I just added the appropriate URLs for the new layer to the TIGER 2012 page on the wiki so you can use them in JOSM and Potlatch as well: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_2012 Since this is a brand new tile layer, nothing is cached in the CDN so requests might be a little slower than normal at first. I am fairly certain about the accuracy of the process and the checks I have performed all came back with good results. But of course TIGER being such a large and varied data set, there might be an odd edge case lurking somewhere so it would be great if some people could check their areas and make sure they don't see anything odd. The other tweak I made after a suggestion from Ian was to draw the tiles in two layers. One drawn first with only lines and then another layer with only names on top of it. This means that road names will always appear on top of road lines. This avoids roads obscuring names and improves readability. Technical details: This was *not* done by doing simple string matching. I downloaded all of the "Feature Names Relationship" files which contain separate fields with codes for directional, type and qualifier prefixes/suffixes. Then I composed the name one element at a time from these fields. This gave me a mapping from TLID to expanded street name which I then imported into a new column in the existing table that is used to render the tiles. Then it was just a simple matter of telling the mapnik style to look at the new expanded name column. Toby _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
