New requirement of government IT tenders to come into effect
25 - 01 - 2001

The ISO 10646 standard will become a mandatory requirement in all government tenders for Chinese computing products commencing next month (February).

The ISO 10646 standard, released by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), is an international coding standard that embraces characters used in all major languages in the world, including ideographic characters in traditional and simplified Chinese.

Support of those Chinese characters in the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) but which have not been included in the latest version of the ISO 10646 standard will also become a mandatory requirement in government tenders.

By using the ISO 10646 standard, 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 can be eliminated. Computer users should ultimately be able to communicate electronically in Chinese both within Hong Kong and with other parts of the world without the occurrence of "mis-coding".

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.

"The adoption of the ISO 10646 standard is a pivotal element in the development of an open and common Chinese language interface in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) to facilitate electronic communications in Chinese which is one of the major initiatives under the HKSAR 'Digital 21' IT Strategy," said a spokesman for the Information Technology Services Department (ITSD) today (January 25).

"ITSD has taken the lead to start adopting the latest version of the ISO 10646 standard, that was announced in October 2000, in the procurement of Chinese computing products where applicable.

"The Government's long term policy is to migrate government computer systems to the ISO 10646 standard," he said.

To achieve this goal, the Government has been actively participating in the development of the ISO 10646 standard with other governments and institutions.

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

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 are being considered by the Ideographic Rapporteur Group, a specialist group under the ISO, for inclusion in future releases of the ISO 10646 standard.

"We will continue to maintain close liaison with the academia and the industry to promote the adoption of ISO 10646 standard," the spokesman said.

"While the Government's policy is to promote the ISO 10646 standard, we will leave the development and adoption of specific products for the support of the standard to the market.

"The choice of Chinese computing products including Chinese input tools should be decided by users based on their individual requirements and preferences."

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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