'City of Brussels' 'Brussels'

Question

GET /v1/geo/cities?countryIds=be&namePrefix=brussels&sort=-population

Gives 'City of Brussels'

But in many systems of record that we want to match with, the location is often spelled just 'Brussels'.

Is there a way to correct for this?

Is there an option to assume the unofficial or more popular city name?

Yuma Heymans · Answer

Thanks, that helps to better understand GeoAPI's name retrieval.

Having an option in GeoAPI to get the most popular or shortest version of the name would be great.

When you've had time to add this, would be great to get notified: 
yuma@herohunt.ai

We're currently a subscription client and scaling up.

Michael Mogley · Answer

Good question. GeoDB uses Wikidata as the source of truth in these matters. Unfortunately, in this case, the Wikidata entry (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q239) has City of Brussels as the official name. It does not appear to have a 'popular name' field, at least for English. The options are to go through the Wikidata editorial process to try to change the official name to Brussels. But since this entry is locked, a simpler (perhaps slightly hacky) solution would be to excise 'City of' from the returned name, if present. You could have a small name normalization method in your code that would filter out this and other generic words from city names you receive. I could also perhaps provide this as an option in the query, but my plate is currently full.

GeoDB Cities

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'City of Brussels' <> 'Brussels'