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

[Kirrily Robert]

On 05/03/2009, at 12:09 AM, Kirrily Robert wrote:
> 2) I'd like to hear some input from people familiar with non-Western  
> cultures, as I suspect we're missing some very interesting things  
> about naming cultures elsewhere.  I forget which culture it was I  
> heard of, not too long ago, where people essentially had two names:  
> one which their close relatives called them, and one used by people  
> less closely connected.  Might have been Australian aboriginal.  Now  
> obviously we wouldn't record this in Freebase as we generally  
> wouldn't know their private name, but it does raise the question of  
> cultures that don't break names along the family/given lines, but  
> along some other line.

OK, I looked online, and it seems that many cultures (including eg.  
Dutch until ~1800) don't use family names but patronymics or some  
other name system, and there are some cultures (most notably Javanese)  
where people only have one name, the best known example of which are  
Presidents Sukarno and Suharto of Indonesia.
>

I'm convinced that any CVT that has fields for "given name", "family  
name", etc won't work.  If we did have a CVT we'd need to have fields  
of name part (eg. given name), name value (eg. "John").  That would  
allow you to say "saint name: Catherine" or "Patronym: Williamson" or  
"Regnal name: Charles" in addition to the more common (western)  
options.  However, it wouldn't allow you to easily sort by surname.

K.

-- 
Kirrily Robert
Freebase Community Director
kirrily at metaweb.com