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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. <br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
-Raymond<br>
<br>
Ed Laurent wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:80b889990903041436s13d283f6l26fba7550686fa07@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">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 moz-do-not-send="true"
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>
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