The benefits of a user-friendly interface are completely incomprehensible to me.

Yes, he is handsome, it’s easier to work with him. But how to calculate material benefits?

Five years ago, a synthesized voice sounded at the airports, announcing arrivals and departures with torn intonation after each word. Sometimes even the speed of speech was different for different words.

And a couple of weeks ago, I heard new announcements of departures. There was a feeling that they were completely recorded by a professional announcer who had studied for this role all his life. The interface has become better, it has become more natural.
Did I start to fly more from this? Unlikely.
Maybe I have a preference between airports? I do not think this is such an important point.
However, for some reason, people have spent time and money on bringing ads to a natural look. And it’s very cool!

I like the natural presentation of information by automated systems, as if a living person were talking to you. It seems to me that these are small details that form an attitude towards your product as a whole.
And if this attitude is positive, then you will be chosen in the future and recommended to friends.

In the article I will tell you how to show the address in one line as if it was written by a person. I can not say with certainty that by reading the article, you will increase profits.
But I would really like as many systems as possible to write addresses beautifully.

All the rules described below, we have developed ourselves. Most of them will be used or will soon be connected todadata.ru .

A year and a half ago, we thought about how to write addresses in a human way. Google did not give an answer on how to simplify the address, so we began to communicate with linguists, conduct tests and experiment.

We sought to develop rules for the formation of an understandable address with a minimum length, written in the way people write it.

Materiel

To automatically generate addresses, we need a source of addresses. If you know about KLADR or FIAS , skip this item. For the rest I’ll tell you that in Russia addresses are formed hierarchically:

1. Each address has a subject. There are 85 subjects in Russia. For example: Moscow region, Komi Republic, Moscow.
   According to the administrative division, Moscow is not in the Moscow region, it is an independent city-region.
   Khimki is located in the Moscow region, and not in Moscow. But Zelenograd, on the contrary, is in Moscow.
2. The subjects have areas and cities.
   A city without a district in the subject is an urban district. For example, Novosibirsk is directly subordinate to the subject "Novosibirsk Region".
   FIAS has a sign of the status of a center for cities and towns. This information will be useful to us in the future when forming an address with one line.
3. In the areas there are cities and towns.
4. In cities there are streets and settlements. According to the FIAS, there are still additional territories there: usually these are garage-building cooperatives, garden-non-profit partnerships, etc.
5. Often in the address indicate the area of ​​the city, for example, “Moscow, Alekseevsky district”, or “Novosibirsk, Shch.” Unfortunately, intracity areas are absent in FIAS and KLADR, so we will not use them in the automatic construction of addresses.
6. In the settlements there are streets, additional territories (the same as in paragraph 4) and houses. There are houses that are not on the street, but simply in the village.

We use the usual word order

To begin, consider the entire string. In Russia, they are used to writing addresses from the highest level of administrative division to the lowest. The usual order of elements is as follows:

1. subject;
2. area;
3. town;
4. locality;
5. Street;
6. house;
7. extension of the house (building, building, staircase, floor, apartment, office, ..).

For example, “Moscow Region, Mytishchi District, Mytishchi City, Ulyanovskaya Street, House 3”

In addition, the order of words within each level is important. For example, it is correct to write “City of St. Petersburg” instead of “St. Petersburg City”, or “Altai Krai” instead of “Altai Krai”. The order is determined in its own way for each type:

• Region, region, region, autonomous region: first the name, then the type.
• Republic, city: first type, then name.
• Elements in cities: areas, streets, squares, etc. The order of elements can be either “name type” or “type name”. We use our own order for each type depending on the end of the name and frequency of occurrence. For example, we write “Moscow, Aviation Lane” and “Moscow, Alexander Nevsky Lane”.

Do not forget about exceptions:

• We write “Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug - Ugra” without a type, since “autonomous okrug” is in the name according to FIAS / KLADR. Example: “Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug - Yugra, Khanty-Mansiysk, Anna Konkova St., 1”
• The Chuvash Republic has a wonderful type of Chuvashia (that is, the name of the region is “Chuvash Republic -”, and the type is “Chuvashia”), we write it after the name: “Chuvash Republic - Chuvashia, Cheboksary, Admiral Ushakova St., 2”, or omit altogether and delete the dash at the end of the name: “Chuvash Republic, Cheboksary, Admiral Ushakov St., 2”

Address from FIAS:


Russia, Tatarstan Republic, Kazan City, Kasimov Brothers Street, 64

after rearranging the elements in the correct order turns into

Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan City, Kasimov Brothers Street, 64

Reading has become easier. But you can do even better and shorter.

Separate types and names using formatting

A simple thing that will help make the address more readable is the visual separation of names and types using capital letters.

We write all types with a capital letter, all names with a capital one. See for yourself, the second option reads faster:

Before:

Kamchatka Territory, City of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Bering Street, Building 90, Apartment 61

After:

Kamchatka Territory, the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Bering Street, 90, apartment 61

Reduce types and names

Type abbreviations are in FIAS. We use them, add our own rules based on customer comments, and leave some as is:


If you want to make your own rules for type abbreviations, then pay attention to two points:

• When reducing types, you can not be afraid to lose uniqueness within the address line. All types stand next to the names, and a person can easily determine what is meant by abbreviation. For example, at the address “Republic of Tatarstan, d Naberezhnye Morkvashi, d 45” without explanation it is clear that the first d is a village, and the second d is a house.
• However, the reduction should be clear. For example, instead of the address “Moscow p Turchaninov”, where “p” can be either a side street or avenue or square, it is better to write “Moscow, per Turchaninov”.

In some cases, people abbreviate the words “Big”, etc. in street names, for example, “B. Ordynka. ” But automatically doing this is scary, as you may lose the uniqueness of the name.

Address before type abbreviation:

Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan city, Kasimov Brothers Street, 64.

Address after:

Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan, Kasimov Brothers Str. 64.

We delete everything that can be deleted

The next step to the ideal address is the removal of redundant information.
If the address is used for delivery of correspondence, then redundant information is best left to simplify the sorting of parcels and letters.
If the address is needed only for identifying the place by a person or courier delivery in the city is supposed, then removing the redundant information will make the address more natural and readable.

We offer the following rules:

1. We delete the country if it is Russia. Rare cases like the village of Paris will not affect the perception: "Chelyabinsk region, Nagaybak district, the village of Paris."
2. Delete the type of the city. The name of the city is unique within one district, so this information is not critical. It was “Mr. Voronezh”, “Voronezh” remained.
3. We delete the region from urban districts (these are the largest cities in the regions, I wrote about them above). These cities are famous and unique in Russia. For example, we do not write “Novosibirsk Region Novosibirsk”, but simply “Novosibirsk”.
4. We delete the area near the centers of the districts (there is a sign in FIAS and KLADR). They are unique and fairly well-known within the region. For example, we write not “Moscow Region, Mozhaisk District, Mozhaisk,” but “Moscow Region, Mozhaisk”
5. Delete the city, if it is clear from the context. Poster of concerts in Yekaterinburg? Stop writing the word “Yekaterinburg” in the address of each site.

While I was writing the article, the idea came up to delete the word “street”. It seems to me that if this type is not specified, it is perceived as default. Let's conduct an experiment: “Moscow, Tverskaya”. What did you think about the street? However, there is Tverskaya Square. However, this is still an unsupported assumption, and this should be done at your own peril and risk. It would be interesting to hear comments on this subject.

After removing the obvious entities, the address from the example will take a more readable form:
It was:

Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan, Kasimov Brothers Str. 64.

It became:

Kazan, Kasimov Brothers, d 64

or, if context allows:

Brothers Kasimov, d 64

We do not delete the type near the house, as usually the address also contains an indication of the apartment or building, and then the absence of some types seems strange to us. But this is a matter of taste:

Kasimov Brothers, 64, building 1, apt. 1

or

The Kasimov Brothers, d 64, building 1, apt. 1

If there is only a house in the address, then without the word “house” the address will look only better:

64 Kasimov Brothers

We break the address into two lines

Our address is already good and beautiful, we can display it in the interface.
There is one know-how, how to simplify it even more with the help of formatting: we divide it into two lines, in the first we write the city, district, subject (in that order) and in the second - the settlement, street and everything else.

Original address from FIAS:

Russia, Tatarstan Republic, Kazan City, Kasimov Brothers Street, 64.

Let's write it like this:

Kazan,
Kasimov Brothers, 64

That's all. I hope the information comes in handy and you teach how to "speak" your programs in a natural language.
If you have questions about the addresses, please contact. We love this topic and always try to help.