HKSARG hosts international meeting on ideographic characters
18 - 06 - 2001

An international meeting on the development of ideographic characters hosted by the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) kicked off today (June 18).

The 17th meeting of the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is being held in Hong Kong from today until this Friday (June 22).

This is the second time that the Information Technology Services Department (ITSD), representing the HKSAR Government, plays host to the IRG meeting. The last time was in 1999 when the 13th IRG meeting was held here.

The IRG is an important forum for representatives from member countries or territories, including the Mainland, Singapore, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and the HKSAR, to work together on the development of ideographic characters in the ISO 10646 standard.

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

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the meeting today, the Acting Director of Information Technology Services, Mr Cheng Yan-chee, said," The IRG provides a coordinated means for member countries or territories to submit local characters for inclusion into the ISO 10646 standard."

"By adopting the standard, IT users in different places will be able to inter-operate with each other in a compatible manner as far as the coding of characters is concerned, thus facilitating electronic communication and the conduct of e-commerce across geographical boundaries," said Mr Cheng.

To enhance Hong Kong's competitive advantage in the international e-commerce arena, the HKSAR Government published its 2001 Digital 21 Strategy in May.

Mr Cheng said,"One of the objectives in the Digital 21 Strategy is to ensure that the community is supported by world class e-business infrastructure and environment."

"As part of our e-business infrastructure, we have established a common Chinese language interface which is based on the ISO 10646 international coding standard," he said.

The Government has submitted the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS), which contains Chinese characters that are specific to Hong Kong and used by the Government and the public in electronic communication, to the IRG for inclusion in the ISO 10646 standard.

Currently, two-thirds of the characters in the HKSCS have already been included in the current version of the ISO 10646 standard.

Upon completion of the next release of the ISO 10646 standard, all characters in the HKSCS will be included in the standard with the exception of a small number of character radicals and special symbols.

The 17th IRG meeting has a special meaning to Hong Kong in that it will perform the final examination of the ideographic characters to be included in the next release of the ISO 10646, proposed to contain more characters specific to Hong Kong, which is scheduled by the end of this year.

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