[artpepper]

What I take from the names article is to make sure you understand your requirements. A blogging platform will have different requirements than, say, electronic medical records.

[nradov]

For EMRs, the HL7 FHIR HumanName datatype covers most of what's needed. Patients can have 0 or more names, each of which can have a full string representation plus 0 or more separate family / given / prefix / suffix components. And each name can be tagged with a usage type (official / maiden / nickname / etc) and validity date range.

http://www.hl7.org/FHIR/datatypes.html#HumanName

[artpepper]

Interesting! Especially the inclusion of a time period field. That's important in time zone information, too.