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One of the under-appreciated advantages OSM has here is that they have a fairly well enforced convention of using fully expanded abbreviations in addresses and
by juliansimioni 6y ago
One of the under-appreciated advantages OSM has here is that they have a fairly well enforced convention of using fully expanded abbreviations in addresses and street names.
It's _much_ easier for automated comparison to replace `street` with `st` than it is to guess which one of many possible expansions to replace `st` with (is it saint? street? sankt? strasse?).
This isn't foolproof but much of the "authoritative" data out there has no such convention, making analysis much more dangerous.
- at_a_remove 6y agoOh, cramming the names into a common format is something I have under my belt, but there are additional wrinkles and, worse yet, local bizarreness (aka "historical convention"). The names are the least of it, really, even if they are ... odd.
- jonas21 6y agoThe official USPS abbreviation list has some pretty crazy ones: https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28apc_002.htm https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28apc_002.htm