[WG: I18N & L10N] Question regarding names

[John Norman]

In Sakai 3 personal profile work the question of how to handle international names came up. I will summarise what I think I heard, but I have a worry that we may be trying to solve a problem that has been solved before so I am writing to tap your collective wisdom.

I *think* we concluded that the following would be sufficiently flexible and useful:
1. 'name' is required in Sakai
2. 'name' will be composed of an indefinite number of fields: name01, name02, ..., nameN - field labelling is a deployment option e.g. name 01 could be surname or family name or lastname according to local practice or it could be labelled as firstname, given name, etc.
3. one field will serve as displayname
4. displayname will be created by rules from the name fields, e.g. displayname = name02+name01 the default composition rule will also be a deployment configuration option
5. displayname can be overwritten (if allowed in the local deployment) by the user
6. for list sorting, the name fields can be given a 'sort importance' so if the local convention is to sort by familyname and familyname is the label for name02, then name02 will be given sort importance=1 and when the UI displays a sortable list, name02 will be a default field because of its sort importance. Where displayname is free-form, it will not normally be a primary sort field.
7. there will also be a link associated with a name field for help, e.g. if firstname and lastname are supplied by LDAP as read-only while displayname can be edited in Sakai, the first 2 fields will link to instructions for updating LDAP data and the displayname will link to Sakai help.

Does this make sense. Does anyone know where to look for a better idea?

TIA
John