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@r... 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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