Adoption of ISO 10646 standard in IT products and services
03 - 11 - 2000

The Information Technology Services Department (ITSD) today (November 3) announced the adoption of the latest version of the ISO 10646 standard in the procurement of Chinese computing products and services for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government.

The ISO 10646 standard is an international coding standard that embraces characters used in all major languages in the world, including ideographic characters in traditional and simplified Chinese.

As a major information technology (IT) user in Hong Kong, the Government takes the lead in the adoption of the ISO 10646 standard in government computer systems, including the latest version of the standard released by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in October 2000.

"Adopting the ISO 10646 standard is a pivotal element of one of the major initiatives under the HKSAR 'Digital 21' IT Strategy, that is to develop an open and common Chinese language interface in the HKSAR to facilitate electronic communications conducted in Chinese," said a spokesman for the ITSD today.

"By using the ISO 10646 standard, members of the public should ultimately be able to communicate electronically in Chinese both within Hong Kong and with other parts of the world with no distortion of information that would have occurred due to incompatibility amongst different internal coding schemes when different parties are not using a common Chinese standard," he said.

To achieve its long term goal of migrating government computer systems to the ISO 10646 standard, the Government will require that all new computer systems and IT services to be procured should adopt the standard, where applicable.

Commencing from February next year, the Government will start to specify the support of the latest version of the ISO 10646 standard as a mandatory requirement in all government tenders for Chinese computing products and services, where applicable.

The Government will also specify the support of those Chinese characters which are contained in the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) but which have not been included in the latest version of the ISO 10646 as a mandatory requirement in government tenders.

"Most of the major vendors and some of the local enterprises have already provided products, such as personal computer operating systems, pen-based input devices and keyboard input methods, with the support of the ISO 10646 standard," said the spokesman.

"We will continue to maintain close liaison with the IT industry to promote the Government's long term policy of adopting the ISO 10646 standard.

"The successful adoption of the ISO 10646 standard in the HKSAR requires concerted efforts between the Government, the academia and the industry," he said.

The Government has been actively participating in the development of the ISO 10646 standard with other governments and institutions.

In collaboration with the Chinese Language Interface Advisory Committee (CLIAC), which comprises representatives from academic institutions, language and linguistics associations and the IT and publishing industries, the Government published the HKSCS in 1999 which contains unique Chinese characters used in Hong Kong.

Chinese characters contained in the HKSCS have been submitted to the ISO for inclusion in the ISO 10646.

The newly published version of the ISO 10646 standard covers its Extension A, which contains 6 582 additional ideographic characters in addition to the existing 20 902 ideographic characters in the previous version.

Amongst the total 4 702 Chinese characters in the HKSCS, 3 054 of them are included in the latest version of the ISO 10646 standard.

Those remaining characters in the HKSCS that have not been included in the latest version of the ISO 10646 are defined in the Private Use Area of the standard.

The Ideographic Rapporteur Group, a specialist group under the Working Group of ISO, will consider including them in future releases of the ISO 10646 standard.

More details about the ISO 10646 standard are available at the "Digital 21" web site (http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/structure/iso10646.html).

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