Validator dismantles fully-qualified name of branch location

[1ec5]

Mathnasium of Blue Ash is tagged name=Mathnasium of Blue Ash brand=Mathnasium branch=Blue Ash. The validator wants to turn it into name=Mathnasium brand=Mathnasium branch=Blue Ash. I would regard this suggestion as mild dataloss.

One could argue that name=Mathnasium would reduce clutter on a rendered map and avoid redundancy in search results (avoiding “Mathnasium of Blue Ash, Blue Ash, Ohio”¹). But a search engine would benefit from indexing “Mathnasium of Blue Ash” in case it receives that string as input. It shouldn't be expected to know that the fully qualified name can be derived from “brand of branch” for this particular brand, whereas another brand would derive the fully qualified name from “branch brand”, and a chain in a language other than English would have a completely different formulation.²

This validator rule is already disabled for some POI types that are commonly known by a fully qualified name, such as shop=car. But the POI in question is an amenity=prep_school: some amenity=prep_school chains like Mathnasium routinely qualify the name with the branch name, while others like Kumon usually do not. There may even be inconsistency within some chains that operate as franchises. This is messy enough that I think the validator should take a less prescriptive approach.

The validator rule should be disabled when branch is already tagged. At the very least, the suggestion should move the fully qualified name to official_name to avoid dataloss.³ This would override some official_names coming from NSI, like “Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill”, but those brand-wide tags are less important than the branch-specific one being dismantled here.

Footnotes

1. It just so happens that the branch in this case is the name of the surrounding city, but for some chains it can be the name of the neighborhood, the street, or the owner, or the owner’s favorite child. ↩

2. Or if it is expected to know this, then the name suggestion index should store a format string for each brand. Perhaps it could also store some grammar rules, for languages that would apply the locative case. ↩

3. Add some common name fields id-tagging-schema#215 adds an Official Name field, so that it wouldn’t appear to the user as though the information had gone missing. ↩

[bhousel]

This validator rule is already disabled for some POI types that are commonly known by a fully qualified name, such as shop=car. But the POI in question is an amenity=prep_school: some amenity=prep_school chains like Mathnasium routinely qualify the name with the branch name, while others like Kumon usually do not. There may even be inconsistency within some chains that operate as franchises.

Yes I think we can just mark this Mathnasium brand (or even the entire category) with a preserveTags property in the NSI to prevent this.
https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index/wiki/Category-Property-Reference#preserveTags

The validator rule should be disabled when branch is already tagged.

I agree - I thought it was already doing this but I will double check it.