Agreed. So do you and @Robhubi agree that if, in a given country the owners don’t create unique names, and Burger King restaurants are presented to the public simply as “Burger King”, it is correct to tag them as “name = Burger King”?
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This proposal contradicts itself by claiming that name=* can only be a “proper name”, then defining a proper name as “unique in the usual context”, where the context may be a town or neighborhood, and finally citing “Tesla Supercharger” as something that cannot be a name=*. Yet “Tesla Supercharger” is usually unique among the set of charging stations in a given neighborhood or city, since they usually don’t install multiple stations in close proximity.
Yes, the U.S. federal government also publishes data about publicly accessible charging stations.[1] This dataset names the stations according to nearby streets and POIs. For example, one near me is listed as “Target – Tesla Supercharger”, named after the department store that owns the parking lot. Unfortunately, the Department of Energy doesn’t spell out the store’s name in full as “Target San Jose College Park”. It fails the proposed test of uniqueness, as there are 26 other charging stations with this exact name in California alone. Good enough for government work, I suppose. Meanwhile, Tesla labels it as “San Jose, CA – Coleman Avenue” on their own store locator. Normally, we might conduct a field survey to resolve a naming discrepancy through ground truth, but all it says on the unit is “Tesla Supercharger”.
Government inspection and licensing databases are also how you’d find obscure gas station names like “NB Oil Company Inc.” in the public domain, ready for a bulk import. I like the idea of a bulk import of these official_name=* tags. It would be much better for the environment than having to fill and empty my gas tank over and over again just to collect paper receipts. 
With OSM attribution! ↩︎
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To persevere on my own line of thought, any description of usage of the name tag should IMO encompass both choices. I don’t think an authoritative prescription is appropriate at this moment.
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Trying to stir conflict by accusing me of “sealioning” belies the absurdity of your answer: “I don’t know, go look it up in a database”. And that’s what everybody else has been trying to tell you all along: the “proper name” of a fast food restaurant cannot solely be determined from cross-referencing a database, and it’s absurd you think so.
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My wording
went completely wrong. Please excuse the resulting confusion. But it also had its good side: the points of view have become clearer.
In When to use I have now formulated the use of brand names in such a way that both options are described equally and neutrally.
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Thank you, this is an improvement over the previous wording.
Would you consider revising the line item about descriptive names too? I don’t think it’s very tenable for us to cast judgment on how creatively certain religious denominations name their individual houses of worship. Most instances of “Primitive Methodist Chapel” would be named after the Primitive Methodist Church or Primitive Methodism; they aren’t the result of someone snarking about how well the chapel is built.
As for the line item about constructive names, there’s a whole proposal in progress about eliminating one glaring exception for the names of route relations:
Examples miss case where clearly only brand should be used.
Having “McDonald’s’” as an example at all, with
“ONLY brand=* is set to the brand name and the tag name=* is omitted because the individual object does not have an individual name.” as option seems highly misleading to me.
For start, is any region where such tagging is preferred by community for this brand?
Is even single object tagged this way for this brand, with knowledge of local community and preferred as correct tagging?
(Note, if single object exists worldwide then it does not automatically mean that it will page should promote it as equally valid, if just tiny community prefers it that may mean that this community is just confused - but is it maybe such case that literally nowhere it is a preferred tagging?)
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I have had a look in my area, there was only one with a distinct name for McD:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1282107889 (no brand at all in this)
The others I have looked at all duplicated the name with the brand:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2796335923
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/448800843
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1926196446
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1270671785
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2139921756
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2139923602
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/11497777266
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4437405203
looking at the history, it seems the NSI has a fair share in what is used as the actual tagging.
Some of them have details about the operator tagged (McD has franchisees and also operates some with own national subsidiaries (judging from the company name)) and the data is seems to be updated from time to time.
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For what it’s worth, there are a few brand entries in NSI that lack a name=* tag, such as Big Bite 
, Buenas Migas 
, and Pizza Union 
. I’m guessing it’s an oversight rather than anything intentional. Generally, though, it’s the operator=* entries that avoid setting name=*, because the operator is usually a more obscure attribute of a place. After all, you typically wouldn’t refer to a park by the name of its managing agency.
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We did some shopping earlier at Kmart (Name Suggestion Index) & Lowes (Name Suggestion Index).
Their receipts are printed as “Kmart” with small print “Kmart Warrnambool”; & “Lowes-Manhattan Pty Ltd” / “Lowes Warrnambool”.
Kmart is the only one mapped so far: Node: Kmart (3545924631) | OpenStreetMap
So again, what “name” should they be mapped as?
Personally, I would map them both as name=Kmart Warrnambool + brand=Kmart + branch=Warrnambool; & the same for Lowes
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Of course, many thanks for the hint.
I would be very grateful for better examples of descriptive names
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I don’t want to go into the topic of name=brand any further here. For the restructuring of key:name it is only a side issue.
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The “Names” page has a full section on descriptive names, so maybe we could just link to it. After all, descriptive names don’t really belong in official_name=* or loc_name=* either. (loc_name=* is more informal, so the line can be blurry, but that’s something each local or linguistic community will have to figure out for themselves.)
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There are often several individuals that share a given name. They have proper names.
If all the Burger Kings were in one place you would probably have a stronger argument about them being a collection of a repeating thing, but it turns out, they tend to be in different places.
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Maybe, but especially if it is not intended - redefining name key should not happen as rewrite.
And proposed text is still (much smaller than before) redefinition of how name tag should be used and pushes fringe idea.
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Sorry about the spam, I should have answered all points in one post. Here goes :
This has already been answered multiple times.
I don’t think any such country exists. But sure, if no chains at all use unique names to refer to their shop, I think everyone here agrees to using name=brand to ease downstream usage.
Even if the brand should be used as a fallback of missing names, just like some already do (JOSM, some tile rendering etc.). That’s a compromise to ease downstream development, and beginners contributions.
Not really, the context can be the suburb/city (even so, it could result in duplicate names). But the context can also rightfully be between restaurants of a same brand, chargers of the same brand etc. This is a common usage, and one I’ve done this week.
Those are and always have been guidelines. Nothing in the world is perfect, and trying to fix through OSM that would be both foolish and contrary to the OSM mission : represent the real world.
Nobody is suggesting that. You asked where you could get the names and multiple sources were shared. That includes surveys and OS data. Some OS data is incorrect, some includes obscure references.
In the examples at hand, the open data is okay, and represent the real-world.
Can you share who said that, and where ? Certainly not me in this thread.
They are not fringe ideas, they are aligned with OSM philosophy : map the world, try not to redefine it.
And what most mappers already do : If there is a public name, we should use it. If not, a brand is fine too, at least for downstream compatibility for software that do no fallback to brand=* or operator=*.
I think actual OSM usage reflects actual usage IRL, incuding the use of the brand name and, occasionally, branch name as the local name of a shop, as it is shown on the facade.
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I mostly agree : I just need to add that the branch name is often smaller than the brand (for marketing purposes), and sometimes it can be even less apparent.
But that’s no reason to not map it. Just like neighborhoods for examples often don’t have physical boundaries and signs with its name, doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be mapped.
And to restate what has been said before, sometimes the stores don’t have names at all, or the name is really obscure (no public presence in the store, nor the web, nor communications); in that case, name=* could be omitted, or the brand could be used as a stand-in for the name (that’s what is usually done).
I think most of us agree that any observable information about the location’s individual name should be mapped somehow. The debate is only about where to put the information. I appreciate that we already have a variety of keys for indicating varying levels of obscurity for this information:
official_name=*alt_name=*branch=*ref=*andref:*=*operator=*orowner=*for professional offices like insurance agents and doctor’s officesadvertising=sign(Just map the sign!
)name=*itself
I’ve used each of these options in different situations. Sometimes I consider the sign’s prominence; other times I consider the customary naming practices in that context. For example, I’ve tried my best to map U.S. Post Offices with branch-specific names, based on the customary way of referring to a post office in this country, even though the prominence of the post office’s branch name sign largely depends on the building’s architectural style.
This is all far too specific for the “Key:name” article. One of the problems @Robhubi originally identified with the article was that it grew into a lengthy guide to names anywhere in every key on a random assortment of feature types. The “Names” article is the proper place to hash out the proper guidance to mappers about names in general. We might also want to include more specific naming guidance in articles about individual feature types, such as “Tag:amenity=post_office”, or in articles for regional mapping communities.
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To ‘ Text is … much smaller than before ‘: Concentrating on the essentials is the core objective of restructuring. See Goal at the beginning of this discussion.
To ‘Text is … a redefinition of how the name tag should be used ‘. By redefinition, do you mean the wording or the meaning?
- Regarding wording: Amended wording is assigned to the core objectives of ‘clarity’ and ‘readability’. See Start of discussion.
- Regarding meaning: what is the reference to the claimed change of meaning, the personal preferences of Mateusz Konieczny? The current article
key:name? Or the main articlenames? It is a core objective of the restructuring to fully correspond to the meaning of the main articlenames. See non-goal at the beginning of the discussion.
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