In English, there’s a very large gray area between formal and attributive names (what we tend to call “descriptive names” in OSM). Some kinds of features are routinely named systematically, such as railway stations and buildings. In general, I draw the line at a name that duplicates the local language’s predominant term for the feature type, but I’ve been defining “feature type” based on intuition to some extent:
building=yesname=Building
amenity=parkingname=Parking Lotamenity=parkingaccess=customersname=Customer Parking Lot
(because a lot is only called this if there’s a corresponding non-customer parking lot)
In other words, how confident am I that a geocoder would come up with a reasonable label for the feature given its tags? (Not that any geocoder tries very hard to do so at the moment.)
In the U.S., we normally wouldn’t call amenity=toilet a “toilet”, but we make an exception for “public toilets”. This public toilet has a less prominently signposted name based on the park it’s in, but if that name weren’t signposted at all, I wouldn’t have added a name tag just because it says “Toilet” on it:
POIs can be inconsistent because of the public’s expectations about what they’re called. Based on common usage, I normally include a place name in the name of a community anchor institution, such as “Springfield Post Office” and “Springfield City Hall”, even if the sign only says “Post Office” or “City Hall”, because these POIs are so strongly associated with a place. On the other hand, I often tag a name on a convenience store or car wash that matches the gas station it’s attached to, without any additional qualifiers, knowing that people will correctly interpret a Nominatim result for “Car Wash Hy-Vee Gas” or a map icon for “
Hy-Vee Gas” as a car wash, not a gas station.
We have to be careful because sometimes the big sign is just an advertisement for the services or products offered, not the name of the business per se. For example, this gas station has a big “Gas Gas Gas” sign visible from the highway, but its name is actually “Marathon”, based on the brand name. This restaurant has a descriptive sign, but naming it after the hotel it’s attached to is more helpful to users. Many strip malls in suburban America have signs for “Chinese Restaurant” and “Hair & Nails” that are nearly identical to the signs for “Starbucks Coffee” and “The UPS Store”, but if you patronize one of these shops, you can get a receipt that says the real name on it. And sometimes the name really is generic or we just don’t know, so we cope with the information we do have.
It was only in the 1980s or so that American newspapers standardized on always writing the road type suffix as part of the road’s proper name in prose, e.g., “Loveland–Madeira Road” rather than “Loveland–Madeira road” for a road that connects Loveland to Madeira. Even before then, a “River road” would’ve at least had “River” as its proper name, because there are plenty of roads along rivers that don’t have that name.
(Indeed, in some other languages, the road type is still treated as an optional qualifier rather than part of the road name proper. This has been a source of some apparent disagreement between HOT and Kaart in Vietnamese, mucking up turn-by-turn guidance instructions depending on whether the routing engine includes or excludes the road type in its own sentence structures.)