For those not familiar: FHIR is a standard that covers health and patient data. IMO, it's a pretty good model. (HL7 is the organization, and there are few other standards under it.)
I'm less familiar with RIM; could you link to it's definition of a name? (The best I could find suggested that it was nothing more than an unconstrained piece of text.)
http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?pro...
The FHIR data model is a little simpler to allow for easier implementation. In the vast majority of real world healthcare use cases it works well. But from a modeling standpoint if you need to cover odd edge cases it sometimes helps to look back at the old RIM.
https://www.hl7.org/fhir/datatypes-examples.html#2.24.1.13.1
In terms of developer-facing complexity, this could be a laughably simple thing to use- just a type that supports equality, perhaps ordering, and conversion to string. Only the constructor would need to be complex. :)
I guess the reason this hasn't been done is simply that the implementation would never be "correct"- there is no formal specification of human names out there, and there would always be cases where some poor individual with an unusual name falls afoul of the system. Strictly fewer cases than we have today, where everyone rolls their own name system, but still some; it's not a solvable problem the way timezone conversion is.
But, on the other hand, that's the way the world is- messy. Developers are going to have to learn better best practices for communally doing our best in cases where there is no perfect answer, because there's only going to be more of such cases as tech continues to eat the world.
I used ML techniques to help smooth over some of the difficult parts (there are many difficult parts). The hardest cases are ambiguous names, for instance delineating Hispanic vs. Puerto Rican naming conventions (they're different). The fundamental approach involved pushing all ambiguity up to the end user, so they always have the option to correct the system.
E.g. is Carlos the same person as Karl?
Well, that depends. Was one of them localized, or are these the actual given names. Just this weekend I was on an offsite and saw a Spanish book about Karl Marx, or Carlos Marx as they had written it in the title, in the library of the house we stayed in.
Clearly in this instance the names are the same, but that requires knowing that Carlos Marx maps to Karl Marx and that Karl Marx is a famous name; otherwise you can't assume the name was translated.
There were many other names on books in that library. I don't know which one of them - if any - also maps to someone known under another name, because that requires me to know which person they are about.
Is Curt, Curth, Kurt the same person? My uncle had all three on different documents, and delighted in telling people about it.
What about countries like the UK, where there is no legal requirement to notify anyone of a change of name, and where a the legal way of formally changing your name - a "deed poll" is just a document structured in a certain way where you assert that you are known under a certain name? My ex is known under at least three different name combinations, all of which are present on different sets of legal documents.
Some subsets of the issue is solvable, but for example there is no way of taking a full name and returning the "name this person prefers to be known by" because the name does not contain that information. You can make a pretty good guess.
But you'll fail dramatically for people from different countries. And don't think for a second you can guess correctly based on where a name is from - many names are used in different countries, and often as different elements (e.g. firstname one country, lastname another; feminine name one place, masculine another), and many people have names that combine different nationalities (e.g. my son has a name that combined an English firstname, a Nigerian middle name and a Norwegian last name).
The only reliable solution is to not assume any one single string can be used as a generic name - you need to ask what to use within a given context and within whatever constraints you have.
But a lot of software has no need for the breakdown, and would be better served by a free-form field.
That's the most important part of the comment above: The concept of a name is so overloaded that unless you ask about the string to use for the specific purposes you intend to use it, then there is very little you can do with it.
Our partners suggested string.split(' '), which produced interesting results against the sample list of github users.
en:disp Eric
is:disp:nf Eiríkur
is:disp:þf Eirík
is:disp:þgf Eiríki
is:disp:ef Eiríks
No. Just because I signed up for your mailinglist doesn't mean we're on a first name basis! I hardly even remember your business exists, do you remember me? Anything else about me except my email and my full name, from which you deduced my first name? Then let's not pretend we're buddies.
This of course depends on how "friendly" I'm willing to be with said business. Which differs if it's an Etsy store, ordering food online, my bank, insurance, etc. I especially hate it when the news letter is in fact 99% ads and promo babble, but has this 1% of useful info that I want to be kept up to date on. We're not close, I'm letting you spam my inbox, call me "your grace" or something.
Can you actually go wrong with just using someone's full name, and erring on the side of being a tad too formal? Is this just a problem with marketing companies that want to "connect" and become "buddies"?
Is this a lesser offense than mangling a name that doesn't cleanly split into first/last? At the individual scale, probably.
The impact, in aggregate, on UX/sales/utility? Could definitely go either way depending on your userbase.
Better than the slimy feel I get when a robot calls me just by my first name. You're a robot, we're not buddies.
FHIR has a relatively general definition for names, but multiple general and country-specific extensions exist for it: https://www.hl7.org/fhir/datatypes.html#HumanName
Such abstractions exist for dates, times, calendars, currencies, calculations with money, and so forth, but not names.
On the one hand I can understand it, because names are so complicated, and how would you sit down and come up with something good enough to represent all of them?
On the other hand they're prevalent in such a high percentage of line of business and consumer facing apps that it's almost ridiculous that every single developer on the face of the earth at one time or another has to come up with their own half-baked implementation.
It's especially ridiculous when you consider that so many of these home-rolled implementations, if not all of them, are rife with terrible flaws that constantly cause frustration and inconvenience to a small but significant number of users.