(Dave and Markus, this addresses both your comments, since they're
quite closely related)
> Geraint North wrote:
>> Out of interest, what do people use the firstname/surname/lastname/
>> givenname distinction for? In Docbook, its main use is clearly to
>> identify document authors visually on the page.
>
> Contributors? A group of authors?
Sure, but that's still basically the same thing - document authors.
It seems to me that within DocBook, the uses for names are much more
constrained than a general-purpose ontology for a 'person' would need
to be - that's what I was trying to understand.
>> Given the variation in naming schemes internationally, I'd be
>> very unlikely to perform any sort of search restricted to
>> givenname or familyname, so what else could it be used for?
>
> I like the suggestion on James page (one of the respondents) to enable
> 'search term' so that I could search on what the person wants rather
> than what a non-local might use?
The thing is, if I'm searching for a document author, I don't want to
miss a result because I'm unfamiliar with the particular local
characteristics of the person's name - the only sensible thing to me
would seem to be for the XML to contain every component of their
name, and for me to search on all of them.
>> Perhaps the correct distinction is to list name components in
>> printing-order, with semantic markup to identify the sort order?
> Which might be your or my interpretation? If it's known (not always
> the case I guess) then surely better to use that person (or their
> locale specific usage if known) for search?
And Markus's comment:
> Naming conventions are a pet peeve for everyone involved in
> generating citations and bibliographies for scholarly publications.
> Scientific journals and publishers have fairly strict rules how to
> display names of authors and editors. In order to do that, you need
> to know the function of each part of the name. Assume the journal
> wants the names displayed as "Last, First M.". A guy named Luis
> Lopez Penabad would obviously be displayed as "Penabad, Luis L."
> although this is all wrong. He is Spanish, has one firstname (Luis)
> and two lastnames (Lopez Penabad), one from each of his parents.
> The correct display form is therefore "Lopez Penabad, Luis". The
> firstname/surname/lastname/givenname elements somewhat help to get
> this right, although you still face lots of problems with non-
> Western names, and even with some standard US names. E.g. if a
> person goes by his second "firstname", like L. Clinton Webb, the
> current DocBook markup has a hard time to catch this
If publishers do have strict guidelines in this regard, it would be
interesting to know _why_ they have these guidelines - I suspect that
they are artefacts from a time when search would be performed on the
printed document itself, which (as Markus showed in his example) has
clear disadvantages.
Obviously an impossible proposal, but if _I_ were King of the
International Author Naming Committee, there seem to be only two
things of interest:
- How each author would like their name displayed
- An unordered set of all the components of their name (including
variants), for search purposes.
e.g.
<author>
<displayas>L. Ron Hubbard</displayas>
<namecomponent>Lafayette<namecomponent>
<namecomponent>Ron<namecomponent>
<namecomponent>Ronald<namecomponent>
<namecomponent>Hubbard<namecomponent>
</author>
<author>
<displayas>William Gates III</displayas>
<namecomponent>William<namecomponent>
<namecomponent>Bill<namecomponent>
<namecomponent>Gates<namecomponent>
</author>
<author>
<displayas>Luis Lopez Penabad</displayas>
<namecomponent>Luis<namecomponent>
<namecomponent>Lopez<namecomponent>
<namecomponent>Penabad<namecomponent>
</author>
<author>
<displayas>Geraint North</displayas>
<namecomponent>Geraint<namecomponent>
<namecomponent>Michael<namecomponent>
<namecomponent>North<namecomponent>
</author>
Thanks,
Geraint.
