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

[Raymond Yee]

Thanks so much for everyone's very thoughtful responses. I am very
interested in not only sorting (my basic request) but also in work to
move us towards parsing the name parts.

My question is: should I wait until there is some change made to
/people/person or should I kludge together my own type (that has the
inelegant but workable firstname, lastname, middlename properties),
apply that type to topics I care about, and then migrate to the new type
when it's implemented? What's the recommended practice here?

-Raymond

Ed Laurent wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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
>
>
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