and we see yet another excellent example of how
the "metadata" b.s. is such an unproductive path.

the o.c.d. people love to focus on these minute
details, which make very little difference at all
-- who cares how "van holst" is sorted?, or if the
"van" is capitalized or not?, or indeed whether
it is "capitalised" or not?, because a search for
"holst" is gonna find it no matter what you do --
and, as if this insignificance wasn't bad enough,
such compulsiveness usually causes full paralysis.

Here BB is right on the point. 

Basically, the metadata is a dataabase. so we have the field

for the name and then one or several fields of indexing

that field. Furthermore in a typical library cataloge you wil

find "Walter van Holst" under "Walter van Holst", "van Hols, Walter"

and "Holst, van, Walter". So where doe sit leave us?

With the development of a structured databese. Which means

that we will have to comprise, that is cover the basic cases and

in certain cases hand edit the fields involved. These special cases

will be harder to find, but there will be a set of rules which will

help us look for them. To make things easier we could use cross-

references as in library catalogues. 

There is no magic bullet. As aexample take look at iTunes.

It has field for sorting Artist. they use a db and for my own

CDs the information is gotten from a diferent DB. I have my own

notion how things should be sorted. So I edit the "sort for Artist" field.

The only problem here is that for classical music sorting/ indexing by 

Artist is not viable. I prefer to use the Komposer field. So I have to 

use a different index. 

So what should be done is say our index follow these rules for names.

If you cannot find a name where you expect it to be search do a full text search

of the field X and you should find what you are looking for if not use the full 

name field !!!