Names are important in many societies, even in technologically oriented ones which use e.g. ID systems to identify individual people. There are many elements of personal names which vary in different cultures. Names such as surnames are the most important as they are used in many processes, such as identifying of people and genealogical research. On the other hand variation of names can be a major problem for the identification and search for people, e.g. web search or security reasons. We show name variations for different cultures to guide the implementation of a rule based naming system, currently worked out for Thai names. We characterize the LIG (Levenshtein, Index of Similarity Group (called ISG), and Guth) algorithms which help to find reasonable variants of names and use an ontology of names to capture the meaning of the variants which are based on Thai naming methodologies and rules. A further benefit of this process is an optimized name searching.