Wikidata:Property proposal/road number formatter

road number formatter

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Transportation

Done: road number formatter (P8498) (Talk and documentation)

Description	template from which “$1” can be automatically replaced by a bare road number to obtain the alphanumeric abbreviation of a numbered road
Represents	road number (Q3241753)
Data type	String
Template parameter	`abbr` fields in the en:Module:Road data/strings system of modules `\|field1=`, `\|field2=`, `\|field3=`, `\|field4=`, `\|field5=`, `\|field6=` in en:Template:Infobox highway system `\|interstate=`, `\|us=`, `\|state=`, `\|field1=`, `\|field2=`, `\|field3=`, `\|field4=`, `\|field5=`, `\|field6=` in en:Template:Infobox state highway system
Domain	highway system (Q25631158)
Allowed values	`.\$1.`
Example 1	Interstate Highway System (Q94247) → `I-$1`
Example 2	Interstate Highway System (Q94247) → `IH $1` valid in place (P3005) → Texas (Q1439)
Example 3	United States Numbered Highway System (Q408192) → `US $1`
Example 4	United States Numbered Highway System (Q408192) → `US-$1` valid in place (P3005) → Oklahoma (Q1649)
Example 5	Ohio state routes (Q96348143) → `SR $1`
Example 6	autoroutes of Quebec (Q2873026) → `A-$1`
Example 7	Federal Roads in Brazil (Q25712298) → `BR-$1`
Source	en:Special:PrefixIndex/Module:Road data/strings
Planned use	Federated SPARQL queries with OpenStreetMap data
See also	Wikidata:Property proposal/road name formatter, road number (P1824), formatter URL (P1630)

Motivation

Many of Wikipedia's road network articles have infoboxes that display the format of individual road abbreviations that belong to the network, in cases where the roads are referred to by their numbers. These road abbreviations often include prefixes or suffixes to avoid numbering collisions with other route networks, though there is no guarantee that an abbreviation is globally or even regionally unique. These abbreviation formats are also found in the en:Module:Road data/strings system of modules for reusability.

Perhaps once this property comes into use, the modules could even draw some of their data from Wikidata. The road number (P1824) property already allows items about an individual road to claim an abbreviation for that road. However, the road data modules allow an article to refer to a route that may not meet Wikidata's notability guidelines, such as a hypothetical route, or a route that for whatever reason hasn't been entered into Wikidata yet.

In OpenStreetMap, route relations are tagged with the network and ref keys. A map renderer that needs to mark the route with a human-readable abbreviation would need to maintain its own correspondence table between the globally unique, hierarchical network syntax and the abbreviations used in practice by highway departments and the general public. Compiling this table from the various road data modules on Wikipedia would be time-consuming; it would be much more convenient to query Wikidata for them.

OpenStreetMap also conventionally tags the individual ways (road segments) that make up a route with a ref key that more closely resembles a human-readable abbreviation. However, for historical technical reasons, this key is not quite aligned with the real abbreviations, nor is it reliably machine-readable. For these reasons, a data consumer that wants to represent the full breadth of route data in OpenStreetMap cannot rely on the "way ref" data either.

Road networks with idiosyncratic road abbreviations would not claim a road name formatter, or any claim(s) would be qualified so that data consumers would know not to apply it blindly.

For consistency with road number (P1824), I'm proposing that this property be called "road number formatter", but "road abbreviation formatter" is probably more accurate.

– Minh Nguyễn ^💬 01:51, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]