Opening Speech by Mr K H Lau, Director of Information Technology Services at the Opening Ceremony of the 13th Meeting of the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG) under JTC1/SC2/WG2 of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) on 17 - 5 - 1999

Chairman Zhang, Distinguished Members, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good morning! I am honoured to welcome you, on behalf of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, to the 13th Meeting of the Ideographic Rapporteur Group in Hong Kong.

To allow all scripts of the world to be communicated natively, electronically and unambiguously, the International Standards Organisation set up a Working Group to develop the ISO 10646 standard. The Ideographic Rapporteur Group, under the ISO 10646 Working Group, has made significant effort and contribution in establishing a standard set of coded ideographic characters. This standard set of coded ideographic characters will enable people using the ideographic characters anywhere in the world to communicate electronically and accurately in their native language. This is crucial in supporting the conduct of social, cultural and commercial activities in the new Information Age.

We would like to see the software developers speeding up the adoption of ISO 10646 in their products as well as facilitating the conversion to the new standard when the next version of ISO 10646 comprising 60,000 ideographic characters is released.

Given a very good foundation and support based on the ISO 10646 standard, we have some urgent tasks here in Hong Kong:

• First, we need a good mechanism for submitting the Hong Kong unique Chinese characters to the ISO committee. To pursue this, we are going to set up an advisory committee which will include members drawn from different sectors including the users, the linguists, the academia as well as the software and hardware industry;

• Secondly, we need to promote the adoption of ISO 10646 in Hong Kong; in particular, local developers of Chinese software will be encouraged to align their ISO 10646 adoption schedule with that of the ISO committee.

With the good effort of all of you here, I am sure that very soon we will break through the barriers and we will be able to participate fully in the digitally connected world in the new Information Age using our native language as well as other languages.

I wish you all fruitful achievement in the meeting this week and I hope you will also enjoy your stay in Hong Kong.

Thank you.

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