At 12:10 PM 12/10/99 +0000, Berthold Weiss wrote:
>We are strongly support the necessity of a structured form of
>personal names. Astrid Schoger and Simon Cox are absolutely right.
I think I would word this differently. I would say that we need to know the
structure of personal names that we receive in metadata. I don't think that
there is any one single structure that we can require, and I don't think
that we can expect that everyone will follow a structuring rule. However,
when a rule is used we need to know what it is.
Structures for names can be very complex (i.e. AACR2) so simply saying
"family name, forename" will not suffice. I'd rather there be a mechanism
by which creators of metadata can indicate when they have used structure
and what that structure is. This would also leave room for unstructured
names (which will be part of our information space). While less precise,
unstructured names, when you know that they are, can still be parsed
simplistically in ways that enhance retrieval. So we want to take advantage
of structure when it is present and work knowingly with unstructured data
when that's what we've received.
I'll give an example. If we have an un-qualified name data element and
qualifiers for that element that indicate structure, we could get:
Name 1:
<name>John Smith, Jr.</name> --> this is simple and unqualified
Name 2:
<name> --> this one has structure
<name.schema>schemaname</name.schema>
<name.given>John</name.given>
<name.family>Smith</name.family>
<name.enumeration>Jr.</name.enumeration>
<name.display>John Smith, Jr.</name.display>
<name.sort>smith john jr</name.sort>
</name>
Can a system handle both? Sure it can. What's essential is for everything
to be labelled correctly, even when the label says: take your best guess.
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Karen Coyle [log in to unmask]
University of California Digital Library
http://www.kcoyle.net 510/987-0567
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