Matching MapKit Places with Facebook Places - ios

Question

I am saving photos with city names to server in my application. Firstly, I am getting city names with MapKit, by using latitude and longitude, and then saving photo and city name to database. Later when user want to search a photo, he/she writes the city name and I use autocomplete with Facebook Places (Graph API).
The problem is Facebook Places and MapKit might have different names (spelling). Even they are both in English. I am wondering how to query from my own server which have MapKit cities in it, with Facebook Places cities.

Answer 1

I assume it a is little bit more complicated as it seems first time. Until Facebook, Apple are not using the same data source for their city names it will be hard to find the cities where the name is not exactly the same if you are using the "raw" string, that you get from the FB places.
Maybe there is a much easier way to achieve it, but my first attempts would cover these options:
Save the geo points when you upload the photo, then find a library, API etc.. that returns you a latitude longtitude data based on the Facebook city name and then use this to query the closest result in your database (based on photo location)
2.
Suppose the user typed in a city name and you have a string value (call it rawCity) with the desired city name. Now rawCity should be contained in or be equal to the string that represents the city's Mapkit name.
Let's assign rawCity to a new string called searchStringCity and remove white spaces from it and make the whole string lowercase (non-ascii chars can make some trouble too).
Now you have two strings that should be added to a dictionary: /Pseudo code/
rawCity = Sample City Name
searchStringCity = yoursamplecity
fbCityDictionary = {rawName:rawCity, searchString:searchStringCity}
After you have the fbCityDictionary you're ready with the Facebook part.
As a second step you need some database related work, so next I would create a searchString column in my database and fill it with the "standarized"(remove whitespaces,uppercases,charachter coding stuff) name of the Mapkit type city name.
Now you can write a query where a db item's searchString value is equal to fbCityDictionary[searchString]. However it won't perfectly solve your problem, it will work when a whitespace or a lower/uppercase letter was the problem, but there are a lot of city names that doesn't has an english version and they can be much different in different map databases.
So you will be good for example cases like these:
Facebook version:
Sample City Name ---> samplecityname
Mapkit version:
Samplecity Name ---> samplecityname
These solutions can improve the results, but I would be curious to hear a better solution.