- From: Sai <w3c@saizai.com>
- Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2011 22:02:56 -0400
- To: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
- Cc: www-international@w3.org
On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 21:48, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote: > Well, there are various problems as for your purposes you would need > many relationships like linking names to geographical regions and to > time even for seemingly simple things like gender, what may be a dis- > tinctly female name at a given time and place might well be used for > males elsewhere. Obviously this is commercially valuable data, so you > don't get sophisticated republishable databases for free, if at all. I figure so, and I'm okay with it not being perfect. But I think it'd be a nice thing to do to make that kind of database/service more broadly available, and if possible to extract some algorithm that doesn't require a giant database that still has some ability to approximate things (e.g. by simple transformations of full name, maybe also given browser locale information). And of course, as you point out, many names are in fact ambiguous as to traits like gender… but one could still try to get demographic data, perhaps, from e.g. census figures. As I said, my goal is only to be able to give a reasonably good guess (that would then be, one hopes, edited and approved by the user in question), as a kind of PoC to accompany this article as to how one can derive alternate forms, etc. > * all 5 "Sai" are male (see caveats) FWIW, I am too (well, at least insofar as we're using non-text-field genders*). TTBOMK most people named Sai are Indian, and it is in fact a male name there. (Mine is completely unrelated to that etymology, though.) * Actually, that minds me: should there be an analogous W3C document for how to treat gender? I'd be willing to draft one, but I'm completely unfamiliar with your processes about how such things are decided. - Sai
Received on Tuesday, 6 September 2011 02:03:43 UTC