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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Schema fragments for everyday stuff
 re sorting names day to day use in english speaking countries - i find it indispensible - it's the way my users think. while from a technical perspective - ie finding a given record - the index can be anything useful - like a ssn, but when you sit down next to users and watch their interaction with data over a whole day or week, they are noticeably more comfortable with meaningfully ordered lists. i even have one user who just can't work with company names sorted technically correct, when the company is somebody's name - they always put them in the system as "lastname firstname pty ltd" - which is technically wrong, but i can't seem to get them to change. sorting and the use of sorted lists is both a technical issue (accessing the data) and a psychological issue (comfort and efficiency in human interaction with the data). seems to me this is a very good application for name spaces where we can have a generic such as <person_name> and an attribute that specifies a name space for the rest, that is culturally, and/or regionally based. eg <person_name attribute_space="en_au">....</person_name> it might seem not general enough and a bit unwieldy, but a register of attribute spaces for names, addresses, etc would be a good thing for developers (ie i can translate your details now, or translate mine for you) without losing local convenience and intuition. even in a country as supposedly multi-cultural as australia the name problem is solved by most immigrants themselves - they adopt localised names - and when i ask them why, invariably i'm told that it's too hard to explain to everyone they meet how their name should be used. so, for my money - there are good localised definitions out there and rather than try to make a big unwieldy universal definition, why not a mechanism for countries/groups to register a definition centrally so those that need to interact can do it easily - and if you don't need to interact, you don't lose local convenience. rick On Sat, 2004-01-31 at 23:35, J.Pietschmann wrote: > jcowan@r... wrote: > > The components of person.name given by your schema are given, middle, > > family, prefix, and suffix. How do you map names like "Abu Ali al-Husain > > ibn Abdallah ibn Sina" (alias "Avicenna"), or "Karen Ingridsdottir", > > where "Ingridsdottir" is *not* a family name? > [snip] > > That's why we have settled for a simple cname. > <person> > <cname>J. Pietschmann</cname> > ... > or > <person> > <cname>Wang Zheng-Jiang</cname> > ... > > I'm always quite surprised why people insist on a more > detailed structure with implied semantics, because the > structure proved much less useful in practice than many > people think: > 1. Sorting: Doesn't matter much in interactive online > applications. It matters on printed lists, but lists with > more than a few dozen names are unwieldy anyway. > 2. Search: Do a substring search. > 3. Incremental search: Split the cname in word tokens, > with "word" defined as "sequence of Unicode letter". > Match all records where the entered string matches the > beginning of any word in the cname. > 4. Implicit relations to other persons. This is unreliable > at best if based on names. I tend to make them explicit. > Its more work but reliable data is much much more useful. > > J.Pietschmann > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an > initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> > > The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ > > To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription > manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl> > 
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