name-suggestion-index (aka "NSI")

Canonical features for OpenStreetMap

What is it?

The goal of this project is to maintain a canonical list of commonly used features for suggesting consistent spelling and tagging in OpenStreetMap.

Watch the video from our talk at State of the Map US 2019 to learn more about this project!

Browse the index

👉 You can browse the index at https://nsi.guide/.

How it's used

When mappers create features in OpenStreetMap, they are not always consistent about how they name and tag things. For example, we may prefer McDonald's tagged as amenity=fast_food but we see many examples of other spellings (Mc Donald's, McDonalds, McDonald’s) and taggings (amenity=restaurant).

Building a canonical feature index allows two very useful things:

• We can suggest the most "correct" way to tag things as users create them while editing.
• We can scan the OSM data for "incorrect" features and produce lists for review and cleanup.

The name-suggestion-index is in use in iD when adding a new item

Currently used in:

• iD (see above)
• Vespucci
• JOSM presets available
• Osmose
• osmfeatures
• Go Map!!

About the index

You can learn more from these pages:

• https://nsi.guide/ - Browse and search all the data
• CONTRIBUTING.md - How to contribute data about brands, transit, and other features to this index
• DEVELOPING.md - If you are a developer and want to use the name-suggestion-index in your project
• MAINTAINING.md - How to setup and build the index, sync with wikidata, and make releases

Source files (edit these):

The files under config/*, data/*, and features/* can be edited:

• data/* - Data files for each feature category, organized by topic and OpenStreetMap tag

  • brands/**/*.json
  • flags/**/*.json
  • operators/**/*.json
  • transit/**/*.json

• features/* - GeoJSON files that define custom regions (aka geofences)

  • us/new_jersey.geojson
  • ca/quebec.geojson
  • and so on…

• config/*:

  • genericWords.json - Regular expressions used to find and discard generic names
  • matchGroups.json - Groups of OpenStreetMap tags that are considered equivalent for purposes of matching
  • replacements.json - Mapping of old Wikidata QIDs to replacement new Wikidata/Wikipedia values
  • trees.json - Metadata about subtrees supported in this project

Generated files (do not edit):

The files under dist/* are generated:

• dist/nsi.json - The complete index
• dist/dissolved.json - List of items that we believe may be dissolved based on Wikidata claims
• dist/taginfo.json - List of all tags this project supports (see: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/)
• dist/wikidata.json - Cached data retrieved from Wikidata (names, social accounts, logos)
• dist/collected/* - Frequently occuring tags collected from OpenStreetMap
• dist/config/* - A copy of the config files (see below)
• dist/filtered/* - Subset of tags that we are keeping or discarding
• dist/presets/* - Preset files generated for iD and JOSM editors

Participate!

• Read the project Code of Conduct and remember to be nice to one another.
• See CONTRIBUTING.md for info about how to contribute to this index.

We're always looking for help! If you have any questions or want to reach out to a maintainer, ping bhousel on:

• OpenStreetMap US Slack (#poi or #general channels)

License

name-suggestion-index is available under the 3-Clause BSD License. See the LICENSE.md file for more details.