Surnames and indexing white pages

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Hello all,

I have questions on the wisdom of making the Surname attribute
mandatory in the Person object class, and also on the construction of white 
pages directories in various parts of the world. I have asked the first 
question to some people a long time ago, but never received much of a 
response. I may be more successful this time due to the greater knowledge of 
the X.500 directory.

The problem is that while the Person object class contains the Surname
as a mandatory attribute, in some cultures there is no concept of a surname, 
and therefore there will be some difficulty in getting acceptance of the
directory by people of these cultures.

In fact, about 6 years ago I shared accomodation with such a person. When I 
described the X.500 directory to him he was angered that people of the western 
culture are yet again forcing their cultural ideas onto others in the world.

His full name (the common name attribute) consists of five components. 
Some components are taken from names in the Koran (he is Islamic), some
are taken from names of significant people among his family and friends.
Although one of the components in his name is also one of the components
in his father's name (in honour of his father), none of the five components 
are consistently handed down from one generation to the next.

He described the naming method used by another group of people. They have
a two part name, with either "bin" or "bintu" joining them (I believe I have
the spelling of these roughly correct). "bin means "son of" and "bintu"
means "daughter of". An example of this is if John has a son Fred, then
Fred's full name would be "Fred bin John". Then if Fred has a son Jim then
Jim's full name would be "Jim bin Fred". Clearly there is no
concept of a surname in this scheme.


The first step to solving the mandatory surname problem, is to change the
Person object class so that Surname is optional. Has anybody thought
about this? It would sure make the X.500 standard more acceptable to 
people of some cultures.


The next issue is the construction of white pages directories when there
is no surname. Does anybody know how the telephone white pages are organised
in countries with these types of people? 

I think that my friend said that the telephone book contained the person's 
full name (or subsets of it as he, for example, rarely uses all five of his 
components). I pointed out to him that his preferred name (i.e. the component 
that he prefers friends to use on a daily basis) is the part known to most of 
his friends, but is not the first component in his name, 
therefore it would be hard to find his entry in the telephone book. He replied 
that the telephone subscriber simply requested an order of the names 
(components) so that people were most likely to find their entry, and could 
have multiple listings with different orderings if they wished.


A related question to the above, is how are telephone books arranged when 
there is the comcept of a surname, but an extremely large number of people 
share the same surname? Some countries have a much bigger group of people with 
common surnames than the English "Smith" and the Vietnamese "Nguyen". For 
example, I have read that one in four South Koreans have the surname "Kim" and
that EVERYBODY of the Sikh religion has the surname "Singh" for religious 
reasons. (I may be wrong, but this is what I have read.) Presumably the phone 
books in these countries are sorted on the second name as well, but how useful 
is the phone book in this case?

What do you think?

					-- regards, John Gottschalk

===================================================================== 
John Gottschalk, 				[e-mail]
Project Manager, CiTR,				[phone] (phone)
The University of Queensland, 4072, 		[phone] (fax)
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia,
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