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

[glenn mcdonald]

Here's another approach: instead of isolating just surname, make your  
new property be /people/person/sortname. You can pre-populate this  
(both in bulk for current data and automatically for new data) by  
taking the regular names and flipping the last words to the beginning  
(special-casing the obvious suffixes), but then any individual  
sortname can be edited to override this. The big advantage of this is  
that it keeps you out of the quagmire of modeling all the internal  
semantic complexity of worldwide naming patterns, but still allows  
you to model the sorting, which is the thing you most often care about.

name: Marcus Wagner
sortname: Wagner, Marcus

name: Dr. Marcus Wagner, Jr.
sortname: Wagner, Jr., Dr. Marcus

name: Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez
sortname: García Márquez, Gabriel José de la Concordia

name: 相川 七瀬 (Aikawa Nanase in kanji)
sortname: あいかわななせ (Aikawa Nanase in furigana)

name: The Grinch
sortname: Grinch, The

glenn