[OSM-talk] Problems with names with postfixes / types

[woll]

I am the person who reported the Nominatim search problem.

On the Nominatim bug:
If a user searches for "xyz" it should be able to return a node which is
tagged "name=a_word|xyz|another_word" (where "|" represents a word
separator). In English that word separator is a space char. In Japanese
there is no word separator.
It appears that Nominatim does not work correctly when the word separator is
not a "space" char. I've no idea how the Nominatim parsing algorithm works,
but I'm guessing that is what the problem is and that it will also fail with
any language where words are not separated by "spaces".

On the "should place names contain postfix types?" question:
In my experience in Japan "all" placename signs contain the postfix type. As
we are mapping what's "on the ground", then the current tags are correct.
Many Japanese states (prefectures) have the same name as the major city in
the state, so the postfix is useful to distinguish them.
In some cases I think that the postfix type has actually become part of the
name. i.e. If a small village is called "yama|mura" (mountain village), then
people don't call the village "yama" (mountain) as that would be stupid!
Even for large places, the postfix is really semantically(?) part of the
name. Whilst for large places, people may refer to them just by their name
without the postfix (when it is obvious that they are talking about "X city"
as opposed to "X state"), road signs and maps all show the prefix.
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