Rankings and Dates in Views (data architecture)

Question

I'm working on building a small name ranking database, but I'm having some issues coming up with how to architect the data. Here's the scenario:

You have a list of 100 names with rankings by year.

|  Name  | 2012 rank | 2011 rank | 2010 rank
--------------------------------------------
|  Carl  |    1      |     4     |    15
| Frank  |   40      |    18     |    34
|  Lou   |    8      |     6     |     4

et cetera and so forth. If each name was a node, how would that content type be set up so you can filter rankings by year?

Would you have a new field for each year that has the ranking in it? ie: Field name: 2012 Rank, value: 8.

Just curious how someone might approach this.

Answer 1

I could propose using Entity Reference or Field Collection for the second item (Rank).

So, Rank should have 2 different fields eg an integer field (Ranking) and a taxonomy term reference (Year).

These modules will allow you for better data manipulation, Views integration, sorting etc.