Richard Ishida, a W3C Internationalization Activity Lead, is a writing a series of articles on capturing data from a large, internationally diverse user base.
People who create web forms, databases, or ontologies in English-speaking countries are often unaware how different people’s names can be in other countries. They build their forms or databases in a way that assumes too much on the part of foreign users.
Richard has currently written two blog posts on the subject and plans to write more. I’ve generally loathed having to use First and Last name fields on forms and prefer to have a single “Full Name” field when possible.