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jcowan@reutershealth.com wrote:
> The components of person.name given by your schema are given, middle,
> family, prefix, and suffix. How do you map names like "Abu Ali al-Husain
> ibn Abdallah ibn Sina" (alias "Avicenna"), or "Karen Ingridsdottir",
> where "Ingridsdottir" is *not* a family name?
[snip]
That's why we have settled for a simple cname.
<person>
<cname>J. Pietschmann</cname>
...
or
<person>
<cname>Wang Zheng-Jiang</cname>
...
I'm always quite surprised why people insist on a more
detailed structure with implied semantics, because the
structure proved much less useful in practice than many
people think:
1. Sorting: Doesn't matter much in interactive online
applications. It matters on printed lists, but lists with
more than a few dozen names are unwieldy anyway.
2. Search: Do a substring search.
3. Incremental search: Split the cname in word tokens,
with "word" defined as "sequence of Unicode letter".
Match all records where the entered string matches the
beginning of any word in the cname.
4. Implicit relations to other persons. This is unreliable
at best if based on names. I tend to make them explicit.
Its more work but reliable data is much much more useful.
J.Pietschmann
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