Many years ago, I worked on a project where we needed to design a schema for recording fairly mundane user profile fields, such as the user’s name, address, and phone number. At the time, my team found ourselves debating over property names like lastName vs. surname, workPhone vs. officePhone, zipCode vs. postalCode, etc. Then we discovered that there had already been some effort to settle these questions, and it had been documented by a standards group – maybe ISO? – that expressed unambiguous opinions on such field names.
Years later – new employer, new project, same problem – but now I am unable to recall or locate that standard.
Please understand, in this question, that I am not soliciting anyone’s personal opinion about what all the field names should be. I am merely asking if anyone can help me locate some standards documentation on this topic that has been published by a well-regarded standards organization, or any other similarly authoritative and respected reference.
One other note, though it's probably irrelevant. In this project, there is no desire to be world-compatible. Being United States-centric is completely acceptable, even if it is perhaps short-sighted.
Any ideas?
Schema.org has a wide range of schemas "for structured data on the Internet".
Your particular needs may be met by the Person schema: https://schema.org/Person
Microsoft also has a Common Data Model with an even more structured set of schemas: https://github.com/microsoft/CDM/tree/master/schemaDocuments/core/applicationCommon. In your case perhaps the User model could be useful: https://github.com/microsoft/CDM/blob/master/schemaDocuments/core/applicationCommon/User.cdm.json