International standards enhance e-business infrastructure
26 - 04 - 2001

The Government adopts international standards to enhance our e-business infrastructure. This is an essential factor for e-commerce to flourish in Hong Kong.

Speaking at a conference on international character encoding standards today (April 26), the Acting Director of Information Technology Services, Mr Cheng Yan-chee, said that an infrastructure that supports e-business through the adoption of international standards is a very important factor for success.

Mr Cheng said, "Under the 'Digital 21' Information Technology (IT) Strategy, we have put in place the essential infrastructure built on open and common standards to facilitate the development of e-commerce in the local community and with the outside world."

"One of the initiatives under the strategy is to provide an open and common Chinese language interface in Hong Kong for facilitating electronic communication conducted in Chinese," he said.

The Government has completed the essential tasks of putting in place the common Chinese language interface by adopting the ISO 10646 standard, an international coding standard that embraces characters used in all major languages in the world, including ideographic characters in traditional and simplified Chinese.

Such tasks include the development of the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) and the submission of the HKSCS to the International Organization for Standardisation (ISO) for incorporation into the ISO 10646 standard.

"Under the aegis of the ISO, we are actively participating in the on-going development of the ISO 10646 standard," said Mr Cheng.

"In June this year, we will be hosting the 17th meeting of the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG) of the ISO in Hong Kong," he added, noting that the IRG is responsible for dealing with ideographic characters within the ISO 10646 standard.

To provide a legal framework for the conduct of e-commerce in Hong Kong, the legislature enacted the Electronic Transactions Ordinance in January 2000.

Mr Cheng said, "We have since set up our local public key infrastructure (PKI) through the establishment of a public certification authority.

"The interoperability of our PKI, including digital certificates and the integrity of electronic records, with our international business counterparts is an area that will benefit from standardisation in coding and use," he said.

He noted that the local PKI was built upon a standard that is widely adopted internationally allowing PKI implementations in different parts of the world to work with each other on the basis of a common and compatible technical framework.

On top of technical standards, the Government also draws on global practices for promoting e-business.

For instance, the Electronic Transactions Ordinance is based on the Model Law on Electronic Commerce drafted by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Laws.

- ENDS -