OpenStreetMap
Street names - change to exactly match those used by the Province
Posted by John O'Hanley on 21 February 2020 in English.I notice that Canada Post and the province now use abbreviated street names. What I mean by that is, for example, “Grafton ST” is used, not “Grafton Street”. The last part is abbreviated (and capitalized):
- ST - street
- DR - drive
- LN - lane
- CRT - court
- AV - avenue
- … and so on …
Here’s a link to the Provincial data.
It seems like the data in OSM for Charlottetown is manually entered, and not uploaded en masse using data from the province.
My feeling is that I would like to change the street names to match EXACTLY what’s defined by the Province. Reasons for doing so:
- it’s always shorter text! This helps in rendering maps, since space is at such a premium on a map.
- it matches exactly the official source. This would make it possible (in principle) to write queries once a year, to see if there’s any mismatch at all between the Province and OSM. Thus the two could be kept in fairly close sync.
- street names are probably the single most important items on a typical map. To be able to verify that they match the Province’s official list would be a boon.
Discussion
Comment from impiaaa on 21 February 2020 at 19:52
Abbreviations are generally not wanted in OSM, since they are ambiguous, and the long form can always be shortened when necessary: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names#Abbreviation_.28don.27t_do_it.29
Comment from Tomas Straupis on 22 February 2020 at 08:32
In Lithuania we use abbreviations for street, lake, wetland etc. names for the same reason - that is the official name. Makes it simpler to do different automated functionality. Shorter names is also cool but is not a deciding factor, as you can preprocess names for maps.
Comment from n76 on 24 February 2020 at 02:47
Concur with impiaaa: The general rule in OSM is to use the long form. There is a one to one translation from the long form to an abbreviation. But the reverse, trying to get the long form from an abbreviation, can sometimes end up as a more error prone many to many problem.
Also, at least in the US the post office is not the official arbiter of the name of a street. The official name is set by the city or county that has jurisdiction for the area. The post office then munges that into something they like to deal with.
And the post office might not have it at all. In at least two places I know there is no local mail delivery, everyone picks up their mail at a post office box. However the streets have names and the houses on those streets have numbers all of which are used by emergency services.
It would not surprise me if other countries work the same way.