On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 9:49 AM, Karen Coyle <[email protected]> wrote:
> Quoting Rob Styles <[email protected]>: > >> If using foaf Person, it might be better to foaf:name for the name, >> foaf doesn't include a variant name so you might need to invent >> that, or where possible you could parse the name into family and >> given using the foaf properties. I know, names are a can of worms. > > 1) cannot parse into surname/given -- it's a one-way street on that > account, and OL decided to take the surname, given form and put it in > natural order. I could use foaf:name for the natural order name. Is this decision final for all time? That would be very unfortunate. Lossy transformations are never a good idea because, as you mention, they are not reversible. In the Open Library case this has been compounded by them being applied incorrectly or to input data which was not in the expected format. This results in entries like http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2872360A/Robert_A._Jr._Hall which, of course, is difficult to match against http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL132461A/Robert_Anderson_Hall when looking for duplicates. Note also, that there are plenty of Hall, Robert entries http://openlibrary.org/search/authors?q=robert+a+hall so the statement about natural order isn't universally true anyway. In my opinion, if you're going to attempt to parse incoming records (which you really have to do since you receive them in multiple formats), you should parse them into their constituent pieces for the database and then reasssemble them in the desired order in the UI. Tom _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
