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North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

bbc.co.uk

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Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#131

Post by dawnerd »

globular-toast wrote: post #127
calibas wrote: post #65

You can print apostrophes on a street sign without any database issues because a street sign doesn't interface directly with a database. At least not yet... All the technical issues here have already been solved a hundred times, there's plenty of other options. It's a little worrying that we're eliminating punctuation in real life because of issues with integrating with geographical databases.

Interestingly, the OpenStreetMap project considers road signage to be unquestionable "ground truth". If the sign changes, the map changes. We can't use any other database because that might not be available under a compatible licence.

I haven’t checked but how do they handle streets if the signs have two different spellings? There was a street growing up that was spelled two different ways and I still don’t know what the right one was!

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#132

Post by bombcar »

tsimionescu wrote: post #121
bombcar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally change your name to have \’ such as D\’Armond. That should break untold numbers of systems.

Lots of countries limit what you can name yourself. I very much doubt having a special apostrophe in your name can be a legal requirement. Either way, apostrophes in names is quite uncommon in many parts of the world, and they are very likely to be ignored even on paper forms in those areas, if they are even allowed. In general, each area has certain limits on what kinds of names if allows/understands, and it is up t…

This results in amusing side-effects, like buying a house requiring you to sign every variation of your name that the credit check found, but it can also get you multiple “one per person” signup options, so there’s that, too.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#133

Post by thfuran »

cykros wrote: post #34

This seems silly for the reason they're doing it, in that a modern database should be able to handle characters with a little sanitation. However, it does seem like it could be helpful when it comes to satnav applications to remove ambiguity. Google's going to autocorrect most of the time anyway, but this way, you're less likely to run into an issue where it takes you to Kings Landing in the wrong town because you di…

>but this way, you're less likely to run into an issue where it takes you to Kings Landing in the wrong town because you didn't type King's Landing in the town you meant.

That's pretty uncompelling. Should we also get rid of the letter s to avoid mix-ups between Kings Landing and King Landing?

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#135

Post by DarkmSparks »

shadowgovt wrote: post #73
DarkmSparks wrote: post #37

Makes me wonder if this was the root cause of that software glitch that wrongly sent all those 1000s of postmasters to prison.

Different issue. In that case, the vendor had given some guarantees of consistency of data across network nodes that the network didn't actually support. Because there were guarantees, the law went looking for horses instead of zebras, and the "horses" in this case were that only a few people had admin rights to mess with the transactions and the audit logs. ... but in reality, no human was messing with those; system…

dropping and duplicating data is exactly the symptom you get from not sanitising aprostrophies in your data correctly.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#137

Post by gumby »

landhar wrote: post #93
gumby wrote: post #91

This reminds me of the more extreme case of Spain changing the treatment of due to limitations of PCs in the 1990s. Our tools should adapt to the needs of humans, not the other way around!

Do you have pointers to this? As a Spaniard I recall that even though I was originally told the spanish alphabet treated the LL as its own letter, it always felt quite inconsistent. And I always assumed it’s removal was more about simplifying things than having to do with computers

There is a comment from "adolph" parallel to yours with footnotes. But I remember the event well (though it was 30 years ago) as the difficulty for programmers was given as the justification for the law (this was a change in collation).

This particularly irked me as unicode was a few years old at this point, and while not really adopted yet, was clearly the future.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#138

Post by gumby »

fluoridation wrote: post #98
gumby wrote: post #91

This reminds me of the more extreme case of Spain changing the treatment of due to limitations of PCs in the 1990s. Our tools should adapt to the needs of humans, not the other way around!

Hmm... However, language is itself also a tool. There are cases where adapting language to another tool is easier than the other way around.

Sure, but the computer is a tool designed to be malleable and adapt to the human. This kind of grunt work (adapting to humans' models of collation) is exactly the kind of task that should be handed off to machines.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#139

Post by Theodores »

In the UK, if you venture from a side street to a main road, the chances are that there won't be a sign to tell you what that main road is, unless you venture down that main road to where it meets another main road. This can be a considerable distance.

I am all for keeping in the apostrophes as they are mini 'flashcards' to help the youngsters learn the value of punctuation. I also think that it is out of respect for residents, if I was on 'St. Mary's Road' and I had to write 'st marys rd' then I would worry that people outside Yorkshire might think I was illiterate.

One day a UK county will do an excellent job of signs, so people always know where they are without SatNav. Remember that many signs were removed just in case the Germans arrived, and we couldn't have them finding their way around, could we?

North Yorkshire council could trial some best practice signage that involves having actual signs instead of making the punctuation vanish. They could get an unexpected tourism boost from doing so with mildly fewer cars on the roads.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#140

Post by michaelcampbell »

msla wrote: post #83
shadowgovt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My local (US) county has a web service to look up property deeds and titles. They "solved" this problem by just having you enter the street name with no punctuation or suffix (ave, st, etc), and if there is a collision the form pops out a drop-down selector to have you disambiguate. It's not the cleanest solution but it works. I agree that bending the humans to serve the needs of the machine feels... Sub-optimal.

For the American case, the USPS has a free API to do address validation and standardization. USPS APIs in general: https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/#dev https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/documentation-u... The specific API: https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/address-informa...

FWIW, I've used this API for some years. On the con side, it uses XML, but on the pro side, it's fast, reliable, and consistent. And free, at least for my volumes.
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