Thanks to all the folks who've commented on this thread and also to the folks who contacted me off list about this. A majority of the feedback I received was very positive, which I'm thankful about. I attribute much of this to the very conservative approach that was taken last time, because there were so few problems, people are more open to more of the same kind of work.
I want to give a comprehensive answer to a lot of your questions. * Problems with bad TIGER data I heard that there were a few questions raised about the last bot expansion. It turns out that there were problems last time related to bad TIGER data. So for example, the TIGER data may have included something indicating that the road had a directional suffix for East, and the road name was Foo T E, since the road had a TIGER tag indicating the directional suffix, the name was changed to Foo T East. The previous bot used the TIGER data to do the name expansions. If TIGER was wrong, so was the name expansion. * Missed contractions in the previous name expansion I received some feedback about lesser used contractions not getting expanded. This should probably be addressed. I'm collecting these and will likely propose just quickly running through them, outside of this expansion. * Common contractions People seemed pretty to agree that for a majority of cases, if the contraction is either a prefix or suffix and is relatively unambiguous, like "Rd" or "Blvd", we can just expand it. I think this also extends to "NW" and other two letter directions. * Concerns about ambiguous contractions and local editing A few people brought up a concern about words which could be contractions but aren't always, such as "E" or "S". I agree with this concern and I think we need to put the plain ordinals into a separate cateogry. I agree and I also agree with people who expressed concerns that the only way to solve these problems is through direct survey. Maybe the solution here is to create notes? * Continually running bot There was discussion about a continually running bot that would go around and fix these, as well as other problems. This is something that OSM has has in the past with fixbot, xybot and currently has with WALL-E in Germany. I think it might make sense for us to have something similar here in the US to address common problems, like expanding Rd to Road, or "road" to "Road". I'm in favor of this idea, but I'd like to hear more feedback about this. If we did it, I'd want the process to be as transparent as possible. - Serge _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
