I'm about to write some code to normalize names, e.g. split out firstName, middleName, lastName etc.

Here's some links on the topic:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Lingua-EN-NameParse/lib/Lingua/EN/NameParse.pm
http://alphahelical.com/code/misc/nameparse/nameparse.php.txt
http://jasonpriem.com/human-name-parse/
http://code.google.com/p/php-name-parser/
http://www.onlineaspect.com/2009/08/17/splitting-names/