Name_official missing in API

Help and support
1

When searching with the API for “buchs” in Switzerland, there are several results:

  1. Buchs (SG)
  2. Buchs (ZH)
  3. Buchs
  4. Buchs LU

Now, the third one is actually Buchs (AG), but the API returns only the “name” attribute, and the interesting information would be available in the “official_name” attribute: Relation: ‪Buchs‬ (‪1684283‬) | OpenStreetMap

Questions:

  1. Would it be possible to add “official_name” to the API?
  2. Would it make sense to standardize the naming (i.e. with/without parentheses and using/not using official name)
address
: 
{village: 'Buchs', county: 'Bezirk Aarau', state: 'Aargau', ISO3166-2-lvl4: 'CH-AG', postcode: '5033', …}
addresstype
: 
"village"
boundingbox
: 
(4) ['47.3804268', '47.4055906', '8.0635778', '8.1166280']
class
: 
"boundary"
display_name
: 
"Buchs, Bezirk Aarau, Aargau, 5033, Schweiz"
importance
: 
0.2780150946188139
lat
: 
"47.3910322"
licence
: 
"Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0. http://osm.org/copyright"
lon
: 
"8.0692413"
name
: 
"Buchs"
osm_id
: 
1684283
osm_type
: 
"relation"
place_id
: 
93492010
place_rank
: 
16
type
: 
"administrative"
2

Just use namedetails=1 to get the official_name (if available on the returned object), e.g. with namedetails=1 you would get the “Buchs (AG)” as official_name in the response for your result#3.

And please don’t call Nominatim just API. The API is sth. else in the OSM universe. Nomiantim would be a way better name to let people know what you are talking about.

3

Just a comment on this: the municipality border should actually be tagged Buchs (AG) in this case as that is the actual name, Buchs the place is already added as admin_centre which will allow the municipality to be found if you search for ‘Buchs’.

This is the normal way we tag municipalities in CH (and Buchs isn’t by far the only case).

PS: I fixed the tagging yesterday.