Παράλειψη "Οδός" και "Λεωφόρος" στο tag name και name:el

When these edits were made we were not aware of a strong community opinion on the matter. We did not intend to upset the Greek community. We edited in Greece as we have consistently edited across the world. We apologize for any disruption caused by our editing. We also apologize for any incorrect tags.

The reason for the addition of Οδός is due to what we see physically on the street signs all around the country. Through ground data showed that the majority of the signs in the cities of Thessaloniki, Katerini, Kozani, and Veroia made use of the word “Οδός.” However, once knowing the stance of the community on this matter we stopped adding them as we saw them. Again we wish to apologize for causing a disruption. I have responded to direct messages where the issue of Οδός was brought up and responded that I will personally remove Οδός from identified areas, but have received no specification of areas to be addressed. I will personally remove any addition of Oδός from any area that is brought to my attention.

However, the fact remains that across all countries and styles of mapping the most consistent and verifiable method of mapping is adding exactly what you see on the ground to the best of your ability. This standard is easily explained to a brand new contributor and is the most reliable method for the seasoned cartographer. When we only add information that we deem worthy into a digital representation of the physical world, we can no longer trust that representation to be as versatile or as accurate in its use for all platforms.

To the Duke:

While we agree that the name should not have been abbreviated, it was what was written on the sign. This has since been fixed. We are very open to having local editors assist us while we make edits. We see that you did in fact reach out to the editor, yet you only addressed the use of Οδός and not classification or the abbreviated name.
We have reviewed the edit and we have images of this area and the road in question. The road is a one lane asphalt road, likely used often by regular vehicular traffic. This is the definition of pedestrian roads from the wiki:

This does not accurately describe the road in question. If we cannot agree that the road is a residential road which is used to access other residential roads, then the more accurate description of this road would be a living street:

Since there was an issue with the classification of the edit, we would highly recommend contacting the editor in question and addressing your grievance. This leads to less confusion in edits and helps educate the OSM contributor base.

The second example you provided regarding the building that was moved to an incorrect location has no history of being edited by any of our editors and only shows yourself as having edited the polygon in the past year. I am not sure I can help explain why that building was in the wrong place. If you would like to provide more evidence that a member of our team was responsible for this move, please inform us. We want to correct any mistakes created.

The last example you provided was simply a mistake by an editor who was still fairly new at the time. Thank you for fixing it. As stated earlier, we hope in the future you will reach out to the editor directly to help them improve their tagging and to help avoid future mistake by that editor.

The move seems to have happened in changeset 61243416 by user mama_bear on 31 July. This is not immediately obvious from the changeset history, as the way itself was not changed, only the positions of the nodes that make it up. However, you can see the move visualized using Achavi: https://nrenner.github.io/achavi/?changeset=61243416


Steve

To Kaart team:

I will say that once and very polite.
Ground rule does not apply in Greece. For many reasons, which i will not analyze right now.
We don’t use the ground rule, because if we did we wouldn’t have a consistent map, because here in Greece nothing is consistent. (on the ground).
And you are claiming that you want to make a consistent map. :laughing:
I seriously doubt about that.

And i insist to the following:
Names prefix “Οδός” and “Λεωφόρος” are uselss in all terms. When we tag a way as highway=* we mean street (Οδός), and when we tag a way as highway=motorway/primary/secondaty implies a street that is an avenue (Λεωφόρος).
So the information is already there, therefor we MUST NOT re-register it again within the name tag.

And there are other reasons too to why i insist to that. **(like because newer street signs omit prefixes “Οδός” and “Λεωφόρος”)!!!
**
So please stop making a mess here. You can go somewhere else, where they use the Latin alphabet.
Thank you.

This is an example of a newer sign where prefix “Οδός” is omitted.

There are thousands of them.

And to add something else to the above, OK you are adding street names, but you (all of you) are not doing it the right way. For example you write Αγιας Φωτεινης instead of Αγίας Φωτεινής. Do you know the Greek “tonos”?
So please (and i am saying this again) go to some other country that makes use of the Latin alphabet,
Thank you in advance.

It appears that George_ath has been after the street names, adding the “Οδός” and “Λεωφόρος” back. They don’t belong to name=* at the very least.

See: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/63858220

I know of a tag that would be more appropriate for those who wish to use them, and that’s “name:prefix=*”.

Prefix “Οδός” and “Λεωφόρος” has been removed from all name tags, all over Greece. Prefix “Odos” and “Leoforos” also has been removed from all int_name tags, all over Greece.

As for the tag name:prefix its ok if someone wants to use it to add the above prefixes, but personally i still think that is useless.
Besides that, this tag is only a proposal. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Directional_Prefix_%26_Suffix_Indication
(JayCBR said that too, and i agree with that).

Thank you.

PS. User George_ath has been notified.

(off topic)mister or miss ika-chan! you used keys “STOP_id” at bus stops. An other user notified me about this (and he was from Russia). Key “STOP_id” doesn’t exist any more, as far as i know.
Anyway, this key has been converted to key “ref” (starting from Attica, with a mass edit.)

Also at “Ιερά Οδός” you used this key and value: old_name:en=Sacred Way!!!
We translate the property only and NOT the name. (names must not be translated) eg. “Πλατεία Ελευθερίας” is translated to “Eleftherias square” and not “Freedom square”. “Ιερά Οδός” is a name. (I was notified by user George_ath).

I deny that I ever added the STOP_id tag: see https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2515049698/history for evidence that I did not invent that.

Oops. Sorry ika-chan!. After thorough research, you are right. It was an other user who added STOP_id tags to bus stops.
My previous post has been corrected.
Thank you.

I must advise that how other languages translate our roads may be beyond our control, but I did do tonight is proof-read the “int_names” to ensure they are not over transliterated, so to speak.

Hello again,

To Sdoerr,

You are correct. Thank you helping me see what happened. I believe we have addressed these Issues. If not please contact me or the editor in question.

To nikospag,
Thank you for your opinion. Let me provide a little context to what we mean by consistent. When we speak of consistency within an ever changing world we do not mean to say that the we wish to make everything on OSM exactly consistent with every other piece of data that has been or will be added to OSM. We only seek to add data that is consistent between what is a physical reality and what is shown in OSM. This is the only way that anyone can talk about consistency in context of OSM with all of the diverse locations, languages, municipalities etc. that are contained in this ever growing collection of geo-referenced data. We attempt, wherever we go, to add data that is consistent to what we see on the ground. To the effect that if you were to stand where we stood and see the sign that we saw it would be the same as what you see on Openstreetmap. We feel that this leads to better navigation because it takes the guess work out of the end users experience. Our opinions differ on this point.

As a personal question. I do not understand where you explain that “Λεωφόρος” means the same as the classifications motorway|trunk|primary|secondary|tertiary. These classifications seem to me to be different designations of roads within a network. Is it possible for one world to simultaneously mean all of these designations at one time in the greek language? Could you also explain to me how “Οδός” can apply to any highway=* tag? Would the definition be large enough to encompass highway=footway?

Regardless of my own personal curiosities. Our team has been working to eliminate “Οδός” and “Λεωφόρος” from the data as you all have asked.

To that end, a user who no longer exists added this name to a way in Athens. “Παράδρομος Λεωφόρου Κηφισσού” I believe you all would like that not to include “Λεωφόρου” unless the replacement of sigma with upsilon changes the meaning. Either way I was unsure of where else to ask this question so I thought I would ask in this thread.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/224023162/history

@Te-Ika
Λεωφόρος (avenue in english) actually means the wide road that can transport a large mass of vehicles.
But eventually is used for many kind of main roads, that hold a lot of traffic, independently of the width-length of the road.
Prefix “Λεωφόρος” doesn’t, any longer sets the standards of each road, but only the priority.
So, since the signs define the name of each road, I dont see the reason to eliminate the prefix “Λεωφόρος”.
Many other countries hold this prefix with no problem at all.

Αν ο καθένας έκανε ότι του κατέβει, ο ένας θα τάγκαρε Avenue κι ο άλλος Boulevard, ενώ δεν υπάρχει τίποτα τέτοιο στην πινακίδα.
Οι περισσότεροι ξένοι που ξέρω μου λένε “Alexandras street” ή ακόμα και σκέτο “Alexandras”, δεν έχω ακούσει ούτε διαβάσει πουθενά για “Alexandra’s Avenue” ή “Avenue of Alexandra” οπότε ας πάψουμε να αυθαιρετούμε.

Δεν ταγκάρουμε τίποτα παραπάνω από ότι διαβάζουμε στη ταμπέλα.
Prefix=Λεωφόρος
Name=Αλεξάνδρας
int_name=Alexandras

ναι εννοείται, κοινή λογική

If I recall correctly, The (unofficial) key was name:prefix=* and not prefix=. In any case, Λεωφόρος does not belong in name=

@ika-chan! whoops, σωστός.
name:prefix=*

Στις Εθνικές Οδούς στο tag της Αγγλικής γλώσσας, στις ονομασίες, έχει μπει ο χαρακτηρισμός “Highway”.
Δεν είναι περιττός;
Ο χαρακτηρισμός highway=primary δεν μας καλύπτει;
Να βάζουμε και το street, avenue κ.ο.κ. στους ανάλογους δρόμους;

I think that there is no single answer on whether or not to use descriptors in other languages. It would depend on the linguistic rules that I have no control over. I remember from the Romanain DWG case where the consensus for named streets in the Romanian language is to use descriptors for named roads (e.g. Strada).

I can say that we can omit “Street”, “Avenue”, etc from the English name (name:en=), but perhaps make use of name:prefix= for the descriptor, in Greek.

There are some cases where I could support the use of “Παράδρομος…” or “Παλαιά Εθνική Οδός…” in name=*, if the reason is to avoid confusion with newer alignments or similarly named roads.

This does not mean that we must use it in every scenarios, but I never liked the idea of just using name=“Παράπλευρη Οδός” on service roads, due to a possibility of confusion where two motorways meet each other (like in Kleidi). We may be able to visually tell which belongs to which, but navigation devices can only read data.

My question targets on having uniformity over the whole map.
I insisted on having a special “pinned” section in the forum about these details, but the answer was "everything is on Wiki.
No mates, these are special directions by the community to the contributors. For example, the omission of the words “Οδός, Λεωφόρος” are not said in wiki. Similar to this is the cases of the names.
A special section where directions about mapping should be useful.
I like uniformity!