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.<br>
<br>-Ed<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 5:16 PM, glenn mcdonald <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gmcdonald@itasoftware.com">gmcdonald@itasoftware.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Here's another approach: instead of isolating just surname, make your<br>
new property be /people/person/sortname. You can pre-populate this<br>
(both in bulk for current data and automatically for new data) by<br>
taking the regular names and flipping the last words to the beginning<br>
(special-casing the obvious suffixes), but then any individual<br>
sortname can be edited to override this. The big advantage of this is<br>
that it keeps you out of the quagmire of modeling all the internal<br>
semantic complexity of worldwide naming patterns, but still allows<br>
you to model the sorting, which is the thing you most often care about.<br>
<br>
name: Marcus Wagner<br>
sortname: Wagner, Marcus<br>
<br>
name: Dr. Marcus Wagner, Jr.<br>
sortname: Wagner, Jr., Dr. Marcus<br>
<br>
name: Gabriel Jos¨¦ de la Concordia Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez<br>
sortname: Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez, Gabriel Jos¨¦ de la Concordia<br>
<br>
name: Ïà´¨ Æßž (Aikawa Nanase in kanji)<br>
sortname: ¤¢¤¤¤«¤ï¤Ê¤Ê¤» (Aikawa Nanase in furigana)<br>
<br>
name: The Grinch<br>
sortname: Grinch, The<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
glenn<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
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