[Data-modeling] how much work done on modeling of personal names -- even for surname + given name?

[Ed Laurent]

Not sure if/how Metaweb is handling this but I think it's a great idea. This
will be especially useful for biblographic import/export down the road. A
suggestion is to create a "Person name" type composed of machine readable
string properties and then writing a script to populate the properties from
words between spaces of Topic names of "Person". There isn't a formal
standard that I've seen but most Western people are listed as PersonalName
MiddleName (if available or MiddleInitial) SurName. Contingencies would need
to be made for "Dr.", "Van", etc. and a validation system could probably be
set up using Typewriter. This suggestion is similar to "Scientific name" of
"Organism classification".

-Ed


On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Raymond Yee <raymond.yee at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would like to be able to sort topics of /people/person (e.g.,
> http://www.freebase.com/view/people/person) by the person's surname but
> don't see any generic properties for a person's surname and given name.
> Am I missing something here or is there no such field in the commons.
>
> I realize that modeling personal names is non-trivial (see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name for example) -- but having a
> way to indicate surnames+first names would be very helpful for many topics.
>
> I looked around on the data-modeling list archives but couldn't find any
> discussion around this issue.
>
> What should I do to have sorting on surnames?
>
> -Raymond
> _______________________________________________
> Data-modeling mailing list
> Data-modeling at freebase.com
> http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/data-modeling/attachments/20090304/f64b444b/attachment-0001.htm