Re: [Gnumed-devel] type of search pattern for demographics

[J Busser]

At 8:50 PM +0200 8/23/04, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
> Sorry, I am too terse at times.

No, you are now helping the relatively uninitiated :)

> user types >O"Hare<
> search term becomes >O("|'|`)+Hare<
>
> this is fed to a regular expression search (which is invoked
> by * (case sens) or *~ (case insens) in PostgreSQL).
>
> This would mean "find any O followed by either of "'` followed
> by Hare".

Can >O("|'|`)+Hare< be modified to also capture OHare
for example if the user thinks
"hopefully I can just type ohare since that is the least work" ?

The value of any extra precision from being able to (or having to)
input:
o'hare if you THINK the patient could be O'hare
(versus)
ohare if you THINK not

is doubtful yes? I mean, you would never presume to distinguish
two patients based on diacritical mark differences (accents) nor
punctuation (apostrophe or hyphens) would you?

PS I forgot the case of hyphenated names after marriage where
typically (but not always exclusively) the bride may append to
their maiden name a hyphen (-) plus the groom's surname.

> We do store  first and last in different fields. We don't
> store admonitions (?term) in separate fields. The problem is
> if the user types "de Groot" how is the machine to know
> whether "de" is the first name or just a particle. Yes, this
> can be partially solved by a lookup on known particles.

I could not find the term "admonition" in relation to naming.
In Dutch, "van" forms part of  toponymal (location-based) naming
"de" can relate to a physical attribute
(though in french could mean "from")

of possible interest:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name
- patronymics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic
- dutch name origins http://home.earthlink.net/~gverver/dnc.htm
- what is a name? http://www.jimwegryn.com/names/What%20is%20a%20name.htm

> In fact, your thoughts on how agency tend to force their wrong
> spelling of names on people brought me to include, say ü -> u
> mappings ...
> ...
>  > > > - disregard accents (plain letters would need to be substituted for
> >  >> accented ones)
> >  >yes
> >  regex?
> yes.

Must you "do" such mapping, or is it built into regex, and is regex built into
Postgres, or does it come from some other library?