Chain Reaction

This tool is currently a work-in-progress. It aims to compare OSM data to office lists of the branches/stores/outlets of different retail chains in the UK. At the moment the source data comprises the Retail Points dataset from Geolytix. The tool works by attempting to match OSM objects with the appropriate brand:wikidata tag to the stores in the official data. A summary of the matches and mismatches found is shown in the table below.

Notes:

• Please do not blindly apply or remove brand tags to OSM objects, just to make things match up in this tool. Only edit tags if it is appropriate to do so.
• In particular, there is an issue with the small convenience stores at petrol stations attached to supermarkets, and also with some stores that are split across more than one building. As an initial work-around for this, the tool will consider any nearby objects that share the same website=* tag as a matching object to also match.
• The Retail Points data is licensed under a licence that is compatible with OSM. But the provenance of the address data probably needs to be checked. There are errors in the Retail Points data, in particular the locations are sometimes off by a few hundred meters. I am not convinced the data is good enough to add new stores to OSM just on that basis. It may be good enough to update the name/brand of an existing store though.
• The automatic suggestions to add/change brand tags in the default iD editor come from the Name Suggestion Index. The suggested changes are not necessarily correct. Please exercise judgement in applying them.
• There is an interesting question about exactly what a brand is as far as OSM is concerned. You will see that Tesco is split into the different named store types, whereas some other similar chains are not. Probably there should be more splitting. It would be good to discuss this.
• There is an error with the Co-op branding. The Retail Points data assumed all Co-op Food stores have the same "The Co-operative Food" brand. In reality these stores are run by a number of different Co-op Societies, which sometimes use different branding. e.g. The East of England Co-operative Society's convenience food stores are branded as "Co-op Daily". So I would suggest holding off adding the generic brand to Co-op stores until this has been discussed.
• The Retail Points source data is not error-free. I've made a number of manual corrections to postcodes and fascias, and a number of locations are out by a few hundred metres. Details can be found on the Source Errors page. If you notivce any errors not listed there, please get in touch.

As a side-product of this tool, you can also view NSI Missing, a list of UK brand:wikidata values not included in the Name Suggestion Index for the UK.