Nice 

This will require some 'playing with' but on the surface, all I can say is...


"SWEET" 

nice... but there is something important missing.

Point 1: Identifying the same actor that playes in different movies. Not solved as there is no true linking, just "guessing" that it is the case when he has the same name.
Point 2: Find the common name for an identified actor. Partially solved, the webpage may help. But only if there is only one actor with that name. For below example it does not work.

example:

There are 2 "Simon Baker" out there. One is sometimes called "Simon R. Baker" (25 Hits).

One born in 1969 is in the film "The Devil Wears Prada" billed as "Simon Baker". The other born in 1986 is also billed as "Simon Baker" in the film "Shanghai Noon".

So, I find 389 profiles with "Simon Baker" and 25 for the "Simon R. Baker". Now the two actors are totally scrambled together...

e.g. in "Shanghai  Noon" "Simon Baker" is credited, but this is the same as "Simon R. Baker"
this is solved once like this:
Simon Baker (1986) as Little Feather (UPC: 717951-010605)
or:
Simon R. Baker [Simon Baker] as Little Feather (UPC: 717951-010605)
and the rest just have him as "Simon Baker". So, both "Simon Baker"  are shown in the new tool, when you are searching for "Simon Baker".

Unfortunately there is no way to solve the "Simon Baker" issues unless you click all the titles on the webpage you provided to find out the common name for Simon Baker with YOB 1986. And even then what will this help us? As there are around 30 titles that are currently wrong, but you are only allowed to fix the one you own... And the next person will do it differently... OMG

Proposal:
- Group the movies in the new webpage by "common name" of the actor. (e.g. When you are searching for "Simon Baker" this would mean one section for "Simon Baker (1986) " one section for "Simon R. Baker" and the third as "Simon Baker". Like this you would at least see that there is already some linking present.
- Introduce a new "bulk" submission fo allow changing of several movies at once: e.g. Select ALL Shanghai movies and set the actor to "Simon R. Baker".
- Even better: Introduce a artificial primary key to the actors and introduce a linking to them. Like this you could linking sifferent Simon Bakers to different actors without hasving to use YOB or any other workarounds. Composite Keys (firstname, lastname, yob) are always bad from database modeling view point.

Furthermore:
The grouping to get the titles is based on the film title. It does even take capitilization into account which gives strange results. I would base the grouping on the original title and ignore capitalisation. Or even better: Why don't you introduce a rule in DVD profiler that is automatically warns the user when they are using "Of" "The" etc. in the wrong form of capitalization?

Note to the fellow users: please do not spam in this topic, it is a vaste of time and bytes.

Cheers, NEWT0N

I just did a search for Roger Lloyd Pack and Roger Lloyd-Pack, and the latter (with the hyphen) was more frequent than the former, despite the links I've provided in this thread http://www.invelos.com/Forums.aspx?task=viewtopic&topicID=200383 which suggests very strongly that Roger Lloyd Pack is his preferred name (e.g., it's the name he uses on his CV).

Also, both name variants had several titles in common (from different regions), e.g. the movie "1984" and "Interview with the Vampire".

I am 100% sure that the hyphenated variant is more common in the database because this is how he is credited on IMDB, since many many profiles still have IMDB data. I'm sure IMDB names will be most frequent for a lot of other cast/crew as well, even though this doesn't reflect how they are ACTUALLY credited...

I tried 'Ken Cole' result's said "WHO"  


Nice one Ken.

Steve

This sounds great - and I'll certainly be having a play when I get home tonight.
But I think Behemot has a point, because of all the IMDB data still in the profiles, we should take the results with a pinch of salt.

But still great work, and it should help us get a lot more accurate linking going between profiles.

Edit: I've noticed that it doesn't work with birth years - I searched on Harrison Ford and both actors' films were listed. Is this what is supposed to happen?

That would be cool - maybe a list of "similar names" at the bottom so you can see what other variations may be worth searching.