The goal of this project is to maintain a canonical list of commonly used names for suggesting correct spelling or formatting that might otherwise diverge from common usage on OSM. When editing a place name like Walmart, users have created many different spellings such as Wal-Mart, WalMart, Walmart Supercenter. In iD we want to help suggest the most common names with the correct formatting and spelling.

The name-suggestion-index is in use in iD whenever searching entering a new item via the sidebar

This index can also be used for passing additional values for a selected name. For example, it's known that McDonald's serves hamburgers so we can use that knowledge to fill in cuisine=burger or other tags that are always associated with a specific name.

name-suggestion-index is also used by Vespucci.

We need help finding all the 'incorrect' names in topNames.json and mapping them to the correct equivalent so the incorrect name is not suggested. By 'correct', we only mean the most common usage on OSM. Check with filter.json to make sure we are using that tag combination and are not ignoring that name already. For example, "Papa John's" has been used 144 times, but has also been entered as "Papa John's Pizza" (62) and "Papa Johns" (68). Mapping them to a singular value is done in canonical.json:

"Papa John's": {
    "matches": [
        "Papa John's Pizza",
        "Papa Johns"
    ]
}

• make necessary changes to canonical.json or filter.json ("what to edit" below)
• run make
  • this will run build.js against topNames.json using the rules defined in filter.json and canonical.json
  • name-suggestions.json and name-suggestions.min.json will be updated

• canonical.json is a list of the most correct names, any possible similar matches to them, and any known tags.
• filter.json determines which tag combinations are included and which names are completely ignored
• name-suggestions.json and name-suggestions.min.json are compiled, any changes made to them directly will be overwritten

• git clone https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index.git && cd name-suggestion-index
• Ubuntu install (install recent nodejs):
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install -y python-software-properties python g++ make
  • sudo apt-get install nodejs npm
  • sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node
  • npm install

• install as described above
• download the planet
  • wget http://planet.osm.org/pbf/planet-latest.osm.pbf
• node getRaw yourOSMfile
  • results will go in topNames.json