Sunday, May 15, 2011

The Main Attraction

I have mentioned the TIGER import several times. The initial import tagged roads with abbreviations in their name. For example "Ave" instead of "Avenue" or "St" instead of "Street." However the general rule in OSM is to not abbreviate things. So a script was devised to automatically expand abbreviations. This script was run by the user balrog-kun. Until tonight I assumed that it had been run over all of the TIGER data. But then I saw a few abbreviations while working on some highways in Kansas and decided to dig a little deeper. I did some XAPI queries (using the database I talked about in a previous post!)  to see if anything interesting stood out. I did one query for all streets named "Main St" and another for all roads named "Main Street" and here is what I got back.

Green is "Main St" and the rest is "Main Street"