Many UK charities either operate overseas or have connections overseas where there are different rules for names. Plus, foreign people in the UK will be connected to charities. Additionally, many charities will be connected with “individuals of status”, and it is important to use the correct formal names. This will be especially important when a charity is lobbying or fundraising at a high level.
Much name data will come from people filling in web forms. From these, it is regularly unclear as some information can be missing or ambiguous.
Therefore, Charity Radar has to be able to support a variety of name formats:
Moreover, some countries use Nobiliary Particles. Such as Alexander von Humboldt. In some cases, multiple nobiliary particles are used as is the case for the current ruler of Liechtenstein: Johannes Adam Ferdinand Alois Josef Maria Marko d'Aviano Pius von und zu Liechtenstien. Quite a mouthful but a good example of the difficulties of dealing with people's names!
This is an area where humans are generally better than computers at parsing information and separating it appropriately. It is therefore probably best to take the whole name and pass it through a parser. As we see more name variations, so we can improve the parser. However, at all times, we will allow the operator to rearrange the components into the correct sequence.
This still leaves the question of what components should we record?