When I first became aware of Organic Maps, the very first thing I noticed was that you cannot search for “Maccas” and get a sensible result back. At the time I gave up on it, thinking that although theoretically not complicated, it would be practically too difficult.
But it turns out this is already a solved problem. OSM data for chain businesses has a brand:wikidata field with values like Q38076, which points to that organisation’s page in the Wikidata database. And Wikidata has a field called “also known as”, which includes a pretty comprehensive list of different names for the chain. If an OSM-based mapping app checked the Wikidata, it could easily resolve a search for “Maccas” as intending to search for McDonald’s restaurants, and other similar such cases. OM obviously doesn’t do this. Does CoMaps? Is there a way to suggest that it should to the developers?
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This is a great idea! Would you be able to create an issue here: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues
This could improve search for many points of interests.
There is quite a bit of work to be done with search to improve it. Right now data is not pulled from Wikidata, so this additional source would need to be added.
If there is anyone who is familiar with developing search and/or C++ and interested in contributing to CoMaps, this would be a great project!
The devs do post and comment here on CoMaps community, but you are more likely to get a discussion going about this in their codeberg repository’s issue section or alternatively on matrix for real time chat with all the contributors.
That would be great. Business location is tough on comaps/organic
Interesting find
How large is the database? Because it would need to be downloadable for offline use. If you were querying a remote database for your search terms, that would be a privacy violation, and CoMaps needs to work offline.
CM already uses wikidata for some things iirc. It doesn’t store the whole database, only what it needs.
I don’t know, but I can’t imagine it’s very large. Only things significant enough to be chains or similar have entries, and it’s one per chain not per node. Then each Wikidata entry might have a few to a few dozen akas at most. I’d be surprised if it’s more than a few dozen megabytes to download the entire globe’s data. Less if you only get your region.
