geocoder-abbreviations

Geocoder Abbreviations divided into language groups. These are lossy word replacements that are useful for geocoding.

In the tokens directory, each JSON file contains a list of word equivalencies for one language and is named by language code.

Each group contains a list of tokens that are considered semantically equivalent to one another -- they have the same meaning, but some might be abbreviations, alternate spellings, etc. Different groups might overlap with one another in the tokens they contain, if the same abbreviation can be used to represent semantically distinct concepts; for example, in English, 'Cl' is short for both 'Clinic' and 'Close', but 'Clinic' and 'Close' are not equivalent, so the en.json file contains two different groups that both contain the 'Cl' token.

Each group also contains additional properties that might be of use in deciding how to employ the token list in question. They are:

Required properties

• tokens (array of strings): the tokens included in the group
• full (string): given a mix of abbreviations and full words in the token list, the preferred full word
• canonical (string): given a mix of abbreviations and full words in the token list, the preferred abbreviation

Optional properties

• note (string): a human-readable note as to the purpose of the group; sometimes contains an English translation of a non-English word
• onlyCountries (array of strings): a list of ISO country codes to which the usage of the replacement is restricted
• onlyLayers (array of strings): a list of kinds of data to which the use of the equivalency should be restricted (currently always address if present)
• preferFull (boolean): an indication that the abbreviation is uncommon and the full form should be preserved if present (for example, 'college' can be abbreviated 'coll' but this is atypical); absence should be interpreted as false.
• regex (boolean): an indication that the replacement contains a regular expression. Absence should be interpreted as false. If false, words should be assumed not to have been escaped for use in regular expression (e.g., periods are just periods), and consumers who want to use them in regular expressions should perform their own escaping before doing so.
• reduceRelevance (boolean): an indication that the replacement will be indexed with a reduced relevance.
• skipBoundaries (boolean): an indication that the replacement shouldn't have to match at a word boundary. Absence should be interpreted as false.
• skipDiacriticStripping (boolean): an indication that the replacement shouldn't be applied with diacritical marks ignored. Absence should be interpreted as false.
• spanBoundaries (number): if present, indicates that the suggested replacement must span tokenization boundaries to be performed, and specifies how many boundaries are spanned.
• type (string): an indication of the semantic class of the word group (for example, a kind of street or road, a number, a cardinal direction, etc.). Currently allowed values:
  • box: a designator of a postal box or similar (e.g., 'PO Box', 'Boite')
  • cardinal: a cardinal direction (e.g., 'North', 'Östra')
  • number: a number (e.g., 'eight', '9', 'trois')
  • ordinal: an numerical ordinal (e.g., 'fifth', 'deuxième')
  • unit: a pattern indicating a unit/floor/sub-address designation (e.g., 'Apt [0-9]+')
  • way: words like 'street', 'road', 'avenue' -- travel throughways

Usage

geocoder-abbreviations is available as a Node.js package and as a Rust crate.

Node.js package

index.js exposes a single function with an optional lang arg or if null returns a map of all the tokens separated by language. It takes an optional second boolean argument for whether or not to include groups with a single token in them, and a third optional boolean argument for whether or not to return the full/advanced representation including all metadata, or a simpler version of just tokens with no metadata that's backwards-compatible with earlier releases of this library.

See the index.js JSDoc for more details

Rust crate

geocoder-abbreviations isn't currently published on crates.io. To add it to your project, add the following to your Cargo.toml [dependencies]:

geocoder-abbreviations = { git = "https://github.com/mapbox/geocoder-abbreviations", rev = "master" }