[libdb-develop] On Naming: NamesInFoaf and LibDB

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

Re: http://rdfweb.org/topic/NamesInFoaf

I don't profess to have any answers, but I do profess to know how I've
dealt with the naming issue in my newest project (which has yet to be
officially announced):

  http://disobey.com/noos/LibDB/
  http://disobey.com/noos/LibDB/?ProjectGoals

Currently, I'm doing things very similarly to FOAF now:

 * have a master "name" element, containing the "full" username.

 * have more specific name elements, for splitting/sorting.

 * have "language (xml:lang) that determines display rulings.

 * variant names ("Jack Berger", "John Berger", "Morbus Iff",
   "Kevin Hemenway", "C.S. Lewis", "Clive Staples Lewis", are
   handled via a variant table, that define relationships back
   to the "authority record". Variant names would also
   cover the foaf:nick property.

Myself, I know very little about names in other countries, and how
they all work, besides the fact that "given+family" is not typical
the world over. I continually read reviews and documentation about
movies that have incorrectly parsed and displayed a foreign actor's
name, blah, blah, blah. As such, I've attempted to make some efforts
to supporting the parsing of names, but it's a novice appraoch.

This is what I'm currently using, based on the comments
and description of the "Person" entity in FRBR. For the sake
of archival, I'll inline the relevant parts below.

 http://disobey.com/noos/LibDB/?DatabaseSchema#h-table__libdb_person

 NAME
 The name by which the person is known. A name may include one or more
 forenames (or given names), matronymics, patronymics, family names (or
 surnames), sobriquets, dynastic names, etc. A person may be known by more
 than one name, or by more than one form of the same name. A
 bibliographic agency normally selects one of those names as the uniform
 heading for purposes of consistency in naming and referencing the person.
 The other names or forms of name may be treated as variant names for the
 person. In some cases (e.g., in the case of a person who writes under
 more than one pseudonym, or a person who writes both in an official
 capacity and as an individual) the bibliographic agency may establish
 more than one uniform heading for the person. Variant names will
 be treated as relationships.

 GIVEN_NAME
 The name given to a person by their parents, themselves, or otherwise.

 FAMILY_NAME
 The name inherited to a person from themselves,
 their parents, or otherwise.

 LANGUAGE
 The language code associated with a person's name: en, fr, de, etc.

 TITLE
 A word or phrase indicative of rank, office, nobility, honour, etc. (e.g.,
 Major, Premier, Duke, etc.), or a term of address (e.g., Sir, Mrs., etc.).

 DESIGNATION
 A numeral, word, or abbreviation indicating succession within a family
 or dynasty (e.g., III, Jr., etc.), or an epithet or other word or phrase
 associated with the person (e.g., the Brave, Professional Engineer, etc.).

Of the above, only NAME is required. The LibDB project will be
aggregating a lot of names, some of which hasn't been parsed
knowingly (a MARC record is often parsed as "family, given",
but IMDB seems to assume "given family", thus causing programmatic
parsing problems on "Mary Kate Olson" or "Baron von Zychowski").
The breakup of NAME into given and family will allow a manual
cataloguer to separate things accordingly.

Romanization vs. character sets I've not dealt with. From what
I can tell, I'll always be receiving romanized name (due to what
I've seen on IMDb, as well as existing MARC records). Again, this
is not set in stone, nor have I specifically recognized the problem.

Since the data represented in LibDB is from a cataloguing
perspective and not a "user's choice" perspective, the comments
in 1.7 of NamesInFoaf do not apply:

  Most people have a single prefered (sic) form of their name, that
  they use to present themselves with. This is the name that most
  likely occurs on the persons homepage or in citations, and the name
  that fits well within the current definition of the foaf:name property.

The example shows:

  <foaf:name>Mr. John Allan van Doe, Jr.</foaf:name>

which, as per the previously database definition could certainly
be possible in a display (based on the interface's coding), but
would never be stored as such in the database.

Concerning middle names, the LibDB database doesn't specifically
support them, under the impression that if the person doesn't use
it in their day to day output, it's not knowledge worth recording
(neither, for example, would be their shoe size). If people do use
their middle name in their day-to-day life, it'd be considered part
of "given", and represented there and as part of "name".

The first version of the LibDB database design has not specifically
addressed the comments of the Dublin Core, as I just became aware:
http://dublincore.org/documents/name-representation/. Concerning
this though:

 * is there a non-obsolete report concerning it?

 * has anyone tried to match up each example in Appendix
   A to an actual xml:lang attribute? Is xml:lang even
   appropriate to help determine styling rules?

-- 
Morbus Iff ( they should rename controlled chaos to morbus droppings )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus