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

[Tom Morris]

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.

You're not missing anything.  See
http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000005ca0b29 for
some of the history of requests related to this.

Freebase considers personal names just strings like any other string.
This leads it to get confused by honorifics (e.g. Dr. John Smith won't
match John Smith unless it's explicitly entered as an alias) and a
whole host of other problems.

While modeling this correctly is non-trivial, even a simple surname
and given names split would be a good start.  The replies to the
discussion seem to have a "go fetch me a rock" quality to them, but if
we don't start, we're never going to make any progress.

One thing that did happen recently, is that all of the topics for
surnames and given names got typed by people using Typewriter, so
that's a start to use as a building block.

Tom