(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.
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