OPDA Knowledge base
Concept tier agent

Name Change Event

opda:NameChangeEvent

Name Change Event

A Name Change Event is the reified record of a Person’s name change — by deed-poll, by marriage, by gender recognition, or by other lawful means.

Why it matters

A name change is a change of attribute on the same individual — it is not the creation of a new Person. A model that creates two Person records (one per name) breaks every downstream identity chain (mortgages, charges, rights) that depends on Person persistence. OPDA explicitly forbids that pattern: per ODR-0006 §Q1, one Person persists through a name change, with a provenance chain on the name attribute via a Name Change Event.

If you are an integrator who has ever conflated “different name” with “different person”, this is the entity that records the change without forking the record.

Hard cases

  • Marriage / civil partnership name change. A spouse takes a new surname. One Person, one Name Change Event, one provenance link from the new name to the old.
  • Gender recognition. A Gender Recognition Certificate updates both name and gender. The Name Change Event handles the name; the gender change is handled by a separate attribute-change record per the same pattern.
  • Owl:sameAs anti-pattern. A naive model declares owl:sameAs between the old-name Person and the new-name Person. This is explicitly forbidden — it propagates every context’s properties onto every other under inference (per ODR-0006 Anti-pattern). The Name Change Event is the correct pattern.

Identity Criterion

Two records refer to the same Name Change Event if they describe the same administrative change activity on the same Person — same change-instrument (deed-poll, marriage record, GRC), same effective date. See the Logical tier → for the typed structure.

  • Person — Name Change Events affect a Person’s name without breaking Person identity
%%{init: {"theme": "base"}}%% flowchart LR accTitle: Name Change Event related-Kinds neighbourhood graph accDescr: Name Change Event records a Person's name change as a reified provenance event; the Person identity persists across the event; the new-name attribute is linked back to the old name via prov:wasDerivedFrom. classDef centre fill:#E1BEE7,stroke:#6A1B9A,stroke-width:3px,color:#4A148C classDef cls fill:#B3E5FC,stroke:#0277BD,stroke-width:2px,color:#01579B NameChange["NameChangeEvent"]:::centre Person["Person
(identity persists)"]:::cls NewName["Name
(new attribute value)"]:::cls OldName["Name
(old attribute value)"]:::cls NameChange -->|"affects"| Person NameChange -->|"produces"| NewName NewName -.->|"prov:wasDerivedFrom"| OldName

Source ODR

ODR-0006 — Agents and roles §Q1

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