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

[Kirrily Robert]

On Mar 4, 2009, at 11:24 AM, Robert Cook wrote:
> I think that it would be fairly straightforward to create a model that
> has high utility but near impossible to create a model that was
> "right" that would be used by anybody.
>
> I've seen on Freebase that the quickest way to kill a practical
> schema  addition is to get mired in too much complexity. We can start
> simply, get data in and improve the model as needed, refactoring or
> denormalizing as we go.
>
> Put another way, an imperfect model with data always trumps a
> "correct" one with no data.


On that note, I hereby propose a property on /people/person pointing  
to family name.  The property should be unique, and be documented as  
being the *current* surname or family name only.  That would allow  
sorting by surname, which was the original use case.

K.

-- 
Kirrily Robert
Freebase Community Director
kirrily at metaweb.com
http://freebase.com/