International Ideographs Core (IICORE)

There are over 70,000 ideographs encoded in ISO/IEC 10646:2003 and its Amendment 1. The formulation of a subset of these ideographs can provide conveniences for day-to-day electronic communication in Chinese on resource-limited devices, for example mobile devices. In addition, this subset can also facilitate global electronic communications in Chinese by providing a shared subset of ideographs.

Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG), a working group for the development of ideographic characters in the ISO 10646 standard, has formulated the IICORE. The IICORE contains 9,810 characters and it can be implemented in devices with limited memory, input/output capability, and/or applications where the use of complete ISO 10646 ideographs repertoire is not feasible.

This IICORE has been published by ISO in the ISO/IEC 10646:2003 Amendment 1 in November 2005. The information related to the development of the IICORE is available for reference at http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/IICore/IICore.htm .

IICORE Comparison Utility can be used by web-masters to compare the Chinese content to be accessed by resource limited devices, such as mobile platforms, against IICORE.