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

[Paul Houle]

Raymond Yee 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?
>   
    It's a tough problem.

    I worked at arxiv.org for a while,  which has an international user 
base where most of the different structures of personal names are 
represented.

    We developed an elaborate data model for author names but came to 
the conclusion that people would misunderstand the model and use it 
incorrectly,  particularly users for whom english wasn't their first 
language -- a more elaborate model would mean messier data!