[Refdb-users] making reality and name normalization coexist

[Markus H. <mar...@mh...>]

Marc Herbert writes:
 > It is irrelevant to authoritarian stylesheets.
 > 
Could you provide an example of a publisher in the natural sciences or
anywhere else whose author name formatting recommendations read: "Use
whatever the bearer of that name prints on his letterhead?" Besides
the difficulty to even obtain this information for all 100+ author
names that an average bibliography carries, I'm not aware of any
publisher allowing this. The result would be bibliography entries
like:

F.D. Roosevelt, Truman, Harry S., Chun Wu, Dwight D Eisenhower,
Schmidt HHHW: A paper about something. Science 56:456, 2000.

Do you think this is acceptable to anyone? Do you think this is
readable? Is Chun the given name or the family name?

 > - there is a strong need for a "normalized" representation of names,
 >   to avoid false duplicates and enhance results of queries.

Agreed.

 > - some formatting tools/stylesheets "normalize" your
 >   names, deciding if and where you should put periods, dashes,
 >   initializing or not, etc.

This is what I experience with all papers and books that I read at work.

 > - some less authoritarian publishers/formatting conventions leave more
 >   freedom about this, in order to please authors and grant them the
 >   right to write their (possibly "weird") name as they want.
 > 

I've never seen this in real life, and I'm glad I didn't.

 > 
 > I think it's technically possible to please everyone, by isolating
 > issues. Let's take the example of this problematic name:
 > (<http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/153368/0>)
 > 
 >    Chu, H.K. Jerry    (that's the precise way he writes it himself)
 > 

In a useful input format, this would turn into something like:
<name>
<familyname>Chu</familyname>
<givenname type="abbrev">H</givenname>
<givenname type="abbrev">K</givenname>
<primegivenname>Jerry</primegivenname>
</name>

This is what the database needs to know in order to do something
useful with the name. It does not care whether that guy prefers either
of these:
Chu, H. K. Jerry
Chu,H.K.Jerry
H.K.Jerry Chu

or whatever. I'm getting tired of this, but this is about
formatting. The XML example above is about input data.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de