States have been precursors in building registers of persons. Here are some national practices and projects in civil registration systems, vital statistics and other administrative identity systems :

• Internationally : UN’s state of the art about population registers, UN’s Handbook of Vital Statistics Systems and Methods, the production of legal identities proper to states, The ICCS convention on the recording of surnames and forenames in civil status registers
• In the USA : US National Committee on vital health statistics about an Unique Health Identifier for Individuals, Unique patient identifier proposals by the US Department of Health and Human Services and a white paper on the same topic, History and basics about the US Social Security Number system, The role of Iowa’s « identity security clearinghouse », the history of US vital records
• In Bulgaria : The bulgarian personal identification number (EGN = edinen grashdanski nomer)
• In the UK : UK’s national health service central register, and the irish unique patient client identifier (UPCI)
• Throughout Europe : The European Committee for Standardization on « names and numbers as identifiers » (includes several national naming/identification practices), Eléments d’identification des personnes en Europe

You are building an international directory of persons, you know that you will record names, surnames, given names. But what does « surname » mean ? Will you be understood when you ask a foreigner his given name ? Here come culture, society and naming practices :

• The Wikipedia on family names
• Naming in the Kashmiri Pandit Community : Gotras, surnames and nicknames
• Latin American Surnames
• Norwegian Naming Practices
• Vietnamese names
• Arabic Naming Practices And Period Names List
• Chinese personal names
• Campaigns of Opposition to ID Card Schemes, How the UK population considers civil registration (see question « what contribution should civil registration make to proving identity and how ? »
• Traduction officielles des noms des éléments constituant l’identité d’une personne dans différents pays européens : prénoms/vornamen/nombre propio/nome/onoma/…, nom/name/appelidos/geslachtsnaam/…

You’ve got existing databases that you want to link to your fresh new directory of persons. But how to build that link ? How to match records coming from different databases when they don’t share a common unique identifier ? This is the art of record linkage :

• Google for « retrospective linkage », « retrospective linkages »
• Record linkage in an Information Age society, Linking Health Records : Human rights concerns, Record linkage techniques
• High performance computing techniques for record linkage, see also their website and febrl, their open source prototype software (powered by Python !)
• Research papers by an expert from the U.S. Bureau of the Census : Matching and record linkage, Frequency-based matching in fellegi-sunter, record linkage software and methods for merging administrative lists