[mkgmap-dev] announced streets are wrong for abbreviated street names on nuvi

Mon Dec 20 19:25:06 GMT 2010

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 08:43:20AM -0600, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
>> Fair enough - but how is your GPS supposed to know that E stands for 
>> Eulogio??? In fact, forget the dumb GPSr - if I saw a street labelled 
>> E Rodriguez I would also assume that the street was called East 
>> Rodriguez!
>
>A similar situation exists locally - there's a major street called "E.  
>P. True Parkway" - I know that the "E." does *not* stand for East 
>although I have yet to uncover what it actually stands for.

On a university campus near the faculty of mathematics you might find an 
"E Lane" next to "Pi Alley" and "I Street". I wonder how these would be 
announced.

On a more serious note, the N,E,S,W can be localized. Even my Edge 705 
uses P,I,E,L in Finnish, but it does not read anything loud. In 
Helsinki, Etelä-Esplanadi (Southern Esplanade) is sometimes abbreviated 
as E.-Esplanadi, where the E would not refer to East.

Conclusion: never use abbreviated names in OSM.

There is a borderline abbreviation that I have not expanded: The bus 
stop next to the central criminal police is called KRP both in the 
signage and in the municipal web page 
http://aikataulut.ytv.fi/pysakit/fi/4620203.html, both in Finnish and 
Swedish. I added name:sv=CKP (for Centralkriminalpolis) instead of using 
the official version KRP. I guess that there could be a tag for expanded 
abbreviations when the abbreviation is the official name.

	Marko