OpenStreetMap
I’m toying with automating the replacement of abbreviation of street names e.g. St to Street, Ave to Avenue etc. It is tedious to do that by hand and the automation process can limit the replacements to tagged ‘highway’s and to the end of the name tag so things like St Andrews won’t get changed to Street Andrews! It would be used on .osm files making the changes, a separate text file documenting the changes (so you can check), the abbreviations and their replacements would be in a text file so additions could be made by anyone (in any language). To upload the changes JOSM would be used.
Discussion
Comment from TomH on 2 March 2014 at 08:39
This has already been done for the US hasn’t it, which was the main place that actually had abbreviations because of the TIGER import - anywhere that has been mapped by hand is unlikely to have them as our policy has always been to expand abbreviations.
In any case if there are other places that need it then you should check out how the US did it for the TIGER abbreviations. You should also make sure you read these pages:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_Edits_code_of_conduct http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mechanical_Edit_Policy
Comment from ECITampa on 2 March 2014 at 15:41
Remember to address punctuation associated with abbreviations such as ave. st. if it is an issue. Thanks for improving the community.
Comment from JimmyRocks on 2 March 2014 at 16:28
I was going to reply with roughly the same information as TomH.
I think this kind of task may be better for a tool like MapRoulette than an automated script. The remaining St tags may be ones that are difficult for the existing bots to pick up, and my be ambiguous between “Street”, “Saint”, or another value (“State” comes to mind).
Comment from nfgusedautoparts on 2 March 2014 at 18:25
the TIGER name expansion had the advantage of the tiger: fields with the base name info mostly still being in place, which allowed for a number of sanity checks. an automated expansion is pretty risky otherwise. i agree with Jimmy, maybe maproulette is a better way to go for this.
Comment from z-dude on 3 March 2014 at 08:43
Automation gives you results like Street Elmo’s Street
Comment from TomH on 3 March 2014 at 09:17
Yes, there are always edge cases, and they work both ways - there is a street called “The Drive” near me which Google abbreviates to “The Dr.”.