[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
re sorting names
day to day use in english speaking countries - i find it indispensible -
it's the way my users think.
while from a technical perspective - ie finding a given record - the
index can be anything useful - like a ssn, but when you sit down next to
users and watch their interaction with data over a whole day or week,
they are noticeably more comfortable with meaningfully ordered lists.
i even have one user who just can't work with company names sorted
technically correct, when the company is somebody's name - they always
put them in the system as "lastname firstname pty ltd" - which is
technically wrong, but i can't seem to get them to change.
sorting and the use of sorted lists is both a technical issue (accessing
the data) and a psychological issue (comfort and efficiency in human
interaction with the data).
seems to me this is a very good application for name spaces where we can
have a generic such as <person_name> and an attribute that specifies a
name space for the rest, that is culturally, and/or regionally based.
eg <person_name attribute_space="en_au">....</person_name>
it might seem not general enough and a bit unwieldy, but a register of
attribute spaces for names, addresses, etc would be a good thing for
developers (ie i can translate your details now, or translate mine for
you) without losing local convenience and intuition.
even in a country as supposedly multi-cultural as australia the name
problem is solved by most immigrants themselves - they adopt localised
names - and when i ask them why, invariably i'm told that it's too hard
to explain to everyone they meet how their name should be used.
so, for my money - there are good localised definitions out there and
rather than try to make a big unwieldy universal definition, why not a
mechanism for countries/groups to register a definition centrally so
those that need to interact can do it easily - and if you don't need to
interact, you don't lose local convenience.
rick
On Sat, 2004-01-31 at 23:35, J.Pietschmann wrote:
> 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
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an
> initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org>
>
> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription
> manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>
>
|
