All, This proposal is a good thing, provided that it does not deprecate current tagging uses.
>From my experiences in emergency services (911), emergency management (FEMA and State/County EMA), and location finding I find that it is often very important to know what the colloquial core phrase of an address is. A "Colloquial core phrase" is something we all use everyday. We shorten names down to a useful, but still meaningful, core. If I were to say that I was at 14th and K, many of my DC friends would know that I was at the intersection of 14 St NW and K St NW. My friends who are not familiar with DC could guess the location given a bit of prompting. In easy cases it is easy to determine the "colloquial core phrase" of an address. Sometimes however, it is not easy to guess the correct local use for a street name or address. For instance my friends in Alpharetta, GA all know that North Point Mall Blvd is not the North version of Point Mall Blvd, but instead is the Blvd at North Point Mall. My friends farther away from Alpharetta, GA probably don't know this. Additionally, many times I have seen St. Lo Dr. mangled by well intentioned people into Street Lo Drive or once and a while into Street Lo Doctor. Of course Saint-Lô is is a well known place in France with a name derived from Saint Laud. Consider how often people mangle the intersection roads "Boulevard" and "Boulevard Drive" in Atlanta, GA. It is about even how well intentioned people convert both names into one of the two valid choices. Steven's proposal creates a mechanism for local knowledge and local colloquial use to be added into OSM. In turn this data, when present, will allow people who interact with the public to better understand the intent of the public in a more precise fashion. The parsing steps move the bits that are not part of the core into well known tags that can be unambiguously dealt with. The unambiguous aspect is equally important as abbreviation usage is often lossy. For instance some US jurisdictions use BL as an abbreviation for Boulevard and others use BL for Bluff. (In the emergency services world hilarity does not ensue). If OSM had such names as "Braided Blanket Bluff" in the proposed tagging scheme If we were to use the proposal as additional tags to the current existing tags people could add to OSM data to the limit of their local knowledge and when they knew the common local usage could, correctly, completely and unambiguously fill out the parsed tags that Steven has proposed. C. On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 6:45 PM, Steven Johnson <sejohns...@gmail.com>wrote: > Hi all, > Following up on an action from SotM-PDX, I've posted a proposal for > expanded tagging for addresses, primarily in the US (though it may have > application in other countries). The intent of the tags is to 1) improve > the description of US addresses, and 2) provide greater flexibility for > local mappers. These tags are necessary because unlike other countries, the > US has no nationwide house numbering/street naming standard. These tags > provide more granularity for local mappers and hopefully, will reduce much > of the ambiguity and confusion with addresses in localities with widely > varying address schemes. > > I invite your comments and discussion on the proposed tags. Thanks. > > > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/House_numbers/UnitedStates > > -- SEJ > -- twitter: @geomantic > -- skype: sejohnson8 > > "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." > -- Einstein > > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-us mailing list > Talk-us@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us > >
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