Can we use cladr tags(suffix and/or prefix) to map streets in Greece?

τεχνοlogictheo · 2012-05-10T05:58:32.000Z

Will it cause problems for you if I use cladr tags in the city I live? (In Thessaloniki, Greece)

siberiano · 2012-05-10T06:04:38.000Z

Sure it will. It’s a name of a Russian addresses database, and it makes no sense to use it outside Russia, if I understand it correctly.

What do you want to do so that you need a prefix?

BTW, CLADR will soon become obsolete, as there’s a new database being impemented/introduced.

τεχνοlogictheo · 2012-05-10T06:13:47.000Z

siberiano:

What do you want to do so that you need a prefix?

Most of the tags in my city have traditionally been mapped as the sign says on the street, example: “Οδός Τάδε”, “Street Foobar”. According to some mappers in my community they prefer to not have the very common “Street”(Οδός) in front of all the names(as is shown on street signs by survey) and just prefer the name.

siberiano:

BTW, CLADR will soon become obsolete, as there’s a new database being impemented/introduced.

Is it global, also what is it called?

Also can we conclude that Greece has the same ‘problem’ as in Russia?
You also use “Street Foobar” just as we do, don’t you?

siberiano · 2012-05-10T06:28:45.000Z

No, it’s made by Russian Tax Inspection and it’s Russian only. Can’t remember the name.

We write “Street Foobar” (if Foobar is a proper name) or “Foobar Street” (if Foobar is an adjective).

You can invent your own prefix.

τεχνοlogictheo · 2012-05-10T06:31:40.000Z

Yes, I thought about name:prefix=“Street Foobar”.

dkiselev · 2012-05-10T06:32:51.000Z

There is no problems for russians if you will use this tags. But i think it’s beter to use other tag name. CLADR - means Russian ADdresses Classifier (just inverse words order). So it will cause many questions in Greece: “Why cladr:* ?”, “What does means cladr?”, “Why we shoud use other country specific tags?”, “How to describe it in wiki?” and so on. Maybe it’s beter to use something like name_prefix/name_postfix or name:prefix/name:postfix or name:status or somthing else/

τεχνοlogictheo · 2012-05-10T06:57:24.000Z

Ok, for the moment I consider name:prefix for Οδός/Λεωφόρος and name:suffix for the name.

Sergey_Astakhov · 2012-05-10T07:01:05.000Z

τεχνοlogictheo:

Also can we conclude that Greece has the same ‘problem’ as in Russia?
You also use “Street Foobar” just as we do, don’t you?

In russian language, “street” can appears not only as prefix or suffix, but also in middle - like “3rd street Foobar”. So we decided always to write a full name, and use some kind of postprocessing in conversion steps to meet requirements of target system.

Komяpa · 2012-05-10T08:01:07.000Z

τεχνοlogictheo, there are software that can automatically decide what is prefix and what is not, and what is the order of prefix and main part (https://github.com/AMDmi3/streetmangler).

It is better not to split that data in OSM, but to make full beautiful name string in OSM, and enhance software to be able to convert it to any format you like (prefixless, with separated prefix, with separate suffix…)

AMDmi3 · 2012-05-10T17:47:53.000Z

τεχνοlogictheo:

Also can we conclude that Greece has the same ‘problem’ as in Russia?

Likely. We similarly have street names consisting of the “name part” (“foobar”) and “status part” (“street”). We don’t call the latter prefix as it can reside in the end or in the middle of full name (CLADR ignores word order, so it uses “prefix” term). There are number of different status parts used for linear objects, like “street”, “avenue”, “alley”, “lane”, “boulevard” etc. Because different objects can have the same name part, but different status parts (like “foobar street” and “foobar avenue”) we definitely need to use full names, and that was fixed in a street naming convention we’ve been sticking to for some years. We’ve also decided not to use any abbreviations (e.g. “St.”), for names to be as most descriptive, distinctive and suitable for machine parsing and as least prone to errors or “editing wars” as possible.

From my point of view, this convention has proven itself to be quite useful. As streets names (which were a mess before) were converted to conform it, tons of address errors were also fixed and other errors (typos, thungs which should not be in name etc.), were found, and it was pretty easy to write software which can convert these names to arbitrary format like dropping or abbreviating status part, reordering words, changing case (differently for name and status parts) etc.

As Komяpa pointed out, there’s a piece of software named streetmangler written by me, which I use to make street names match our convention and to find/fix naming errors. Though it was written for Russia, it abstracts from the specific language and may be easily extended to support Greek. The documentation is in Russian too, but I can translate it to English if needed. Althrough it requires some extra work of creating a database of street names, you may find it useful for both checking/fixing names in OSM database and for post-processing OSM data before it’s used for e.g. rendering tiles or converted to some other format.

Summarizing above said and my experience, I’d not recommend to introduce extra tags for name suffix/prefix, as there’s already name= tag, it should contain full unambiguous name, and if it does, it’s pretty suitable for automatic parsing and splitting into distinct parts. Prefix/suffix tags are non-standard, redundant (as they duplicate data from name), will require extra effort of keeping them in sync to name and thus make data much more prone to errors.