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