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

[Ed Laurent]

The ability to sort names is certainly a priority for everyone involved in
this discussion but I'd personally like to see this as a step towards
parsing the name parts so they can be formatted in various ways (e.g,. Dr.
Marcus J. Wagner, Jr. = M Wagner OR M.J. Wagner, Jr.,  OR Wagner, M.J., OR
...). I'm not sure this suggestion gets us along that path. While I agree
with Robert that the initial model should be simple so it gets done and gets
used, I hope we can also keep these more complex use cases in mind and make
some progress towards them at the same time.

-Ed


On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 5:16 PM, glenn mcdonald <gmcdonald at itasoftware.com>wrote:

> 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 Jos¨¦ de la Concordia Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez
> sortname: Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez, Gabriel Jos¨¦ de la Concordia
>
> name: Ïà´¨ Æßž (Aikawa Nanase in kanji)
> sortname: ¤¢¤¤¤«¤ï¤Ê¤Ê¤» (Aikawa Nanase in furigana)
>
> name: The Grinch
> sortname: Grinch, The
>
> glenn
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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/f03d2e6e/attachment.htm