[mkgmap-dev] address search and road names with refs

Thu Mar 19 15:09:39 GMT 2015

Here's a comment that's not only US-centric but also Mass-centric.  I'm
specifically talking about my town but that is normal.

The main road in my town is called "Great Road".  It is also
Massachusetts Route 117.  There are 117 signs on it, and probably
someplace there is a Great Road sign.  Everybody local knows both names.
When giving directions to non-locals only "117" is used.

Addresses are always only using the road name, for example the Town Hall
is "375 Great Road".  Writing this as "375 Route 117" would get
understood, but would be viewed as confused.

Great Road shows up as Great Road with a SR117 shield (SR vs MA is a
tagging issue irrelevant to this discussion), arising from
  name=Great Road
  ref=SR 117

The address tagging on the town hall says
  addr:street=Great Road
and does not mention 117.  The rest assumes there are no address tags
with 117 in them.

That's a long lead in, but

* I think it's correct in this case that that the address tagging refers
  only to Great Road and not 117.

* mkgmap should definitely not present the primary address name as Great
  Road (SR 117), even if the label for the way looks like that.

* If one can search for "375 Route 117", but it doesn't show up if you
  don't search, that's fine.  (Nominatim does this, but you have to get
  the route ref right.  It then returns the address as Great Road.)

* mkgmap should offer "Great Road" as a street in address search, and
  not 117.

* both the 117 ref and the name should be in the find-street-by-name
  index

* There should probably be some tagging scheme to determine if "Great
  Road" or "Route 117" should be considered the primary name to
  display/speak in navigation.  Which one is right really depends on
  local culture and which signs are more prominent.  But the style I'm
  using says e.g. "Great Road sir 117" for a lot of these roads, which
  is highly useful.

In short, the ref for the road is part of the road's name, but not part
of any addresses on the road.  So mkgmap should only use the address:*
data for addresses, and not merge in any refs from the way that is named
by address:street.

If someplace an address is "375 Route 117", then arguably the way should
have a name="Route 117" in addition to ref, and the addr:street on the
building should say "Route 117".

So I guess the question is how addresses work in a bunch of other
places.  Do people consider using the route number equivalent and a
completely ok thing to do?

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