[libdb-develop] On Naming A Person and The Cultural And Familiar Divide

[Morbus I. <mo...@di...>]

[Bruce - starting a new topic on this at libdb-discuss @ SF]

The conversation, in progress, is:

  * instead of just person.name, you should have
    person.given_name and person.family_name.

My initial complaint was that this assumes healthy knowledge of what 
nationality the name is from: how they culturally display their names
(given/family, family/given, etc.). Think Korean, Chinese, Japanese.

Bruce's response is valid:

  >This isn't a problem though.  Just attach an xml:lang attribute to such
  >names.  This is part of the reason to use family and given rather than

But, still: in my head, it's not that easy. If my client (a movie
rental store) is adding in cast information, it assumes a great deal
of knowledge for him: that he's going to know what nationality a name
is coming from (he has roughly 2000 foreign films), as well as how
to properly split the given and family depending on that nationality
(as well as being able to spot errors from people who don't and have
placed it on the box cover wrong, in IMDB wrong, etc., etc., which
happens very, very frequently). Likewise, it also assumes that extra
information is out there somewhere for me to aggregate: basing some
data entry from IMDB or Amazon would be impossible.


-- 
Morbus Iff ( i put the demon back in codemonkey )
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
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