KFC vs. Kentucky Fried Chicken

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@davidoskky

Should we use local names or a globally accepted one to name things?
I think this is the main argument of debate here.

name is the “primary” name, which is a simplistic way of saying that we sometimes have to weigh multiple good options using common sense. Sometimes the local name is the most verifiable on the ground, but sometimes out-of-towners are so unfamiliar with it that it has to be relegated to loc_name to avoid confusion. Other times, out-of-towners have continued to use an outdated name out of habit and apathy. This gets even more complicated when an individual store location is part of a chain. Sometimes chains let individual franchises cobrand their locations. This is especially common at roadside amenities like restaurants and gas stations.

@davidoskky

Thus the main problem is how to let everybody around the world understand which shop that is, as well as letting local people understand what that is?

There’s a longstanding practice to tag multinational brands based on local realities. After all, we’re making a map, not just a business directory. The name suggestion index supports this practice by maintaining multiple entries for the same brand that can be scoped to different geographies. Currently, NSI has 613 amenity=fast_food entries associated with 559 distinct brand:wikidata values. There are seven entries for KFC, including PFK in Québec. These redundant entries aren’t always due to translation into other languages. Many foreign brands in Japan cobrand with a local name, such as Showa Shell.

@Adamant1

In this case though we are talking about a global brand, globalish preset in iD Editor, and Nominatim is a global search engine. So the globally accepted name is what matters here. Not what someone in North Korea calls the restaurant.

By the way, most search engines support both global and proximity-based searching for different use cases. When I use Organic Maps in the U.S., I care much more about finding the restaurants near me based on the names they use in the U.S., even if the chain is usually called another name in its home country. On the other hand, when I’m abroad, it’s really nice to be able to find a familiar brand by the names I know back home. A search engine could use either NSI or Wikidata to cross-reference brands by their names specific to other places.

There have even been musings about search engines and renderers using brand:wikidata to display some familiar logos based on brand:wikidata, just as iD does today for NSI presets. To @Peter_Elderson, Colonel Sanders’ face on the map might as well be a , but no map of a Japanese city is complete without 7-Eleven’s logo all over the place. (It’s literally part of the map key on Japanese maps.)