Government initiative facilitates e-communication in Chinese
24 - 06 - 2001
An international meeting on the development of ideographic characters
facilitating electronic communication in Chinese was successfully
held in Hong Kong last week.
Representing the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative
Region (HKSAR), the Information Technology Services Department
(ITSD) hosted the 17th meeting of the Ideographic Rapporteur
Group (IRG) between June 18 and 22.
Working under the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO), the IRG is responsible for the enhancement and the
inclusion of new characters into the repertoire of ideographic
characters in the ISO 10646 standard.
The ISO 10646 is an international coding standard that embraces
characters used in all major languages in the world, including
characters in traditional and simplified Chinese.
Members of the IRG include the Mainland, Singapore, Japan,
North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, USA, the HKSAR
and the Unicode Consortium. The Macau SAR also took part at
the IRG meeting for the first time last week.
The 17th IRG meeting performed the final examination of the
ideographic characters to be included in the next release
of the ISO 10646 standard, which is scheduled for the end
of this year.
The HKSAR Government has been dedicating efforts to adopt
the ISO 10646 standard as part of the open and common Chinese
language interface in the HKSAR to facilitate the conduct
of electronic communication in Chinese more accurately by
members of the public.
The Government released in 1999 the Hong Kong Supplementary
Character Set (HKSCS) in collaboration with the Chinese Language
Interface Advisory Committee.
The HKSCS contains Chinese characters that are specific to
Hong Kong and used by the Government and the public in electronic
communication.
The Government has submitted the HKSCS to the ISO for inclusion
in the ISO 10646 standard. Two-thirds of the characters in
the HKSCS have already been included in the current version
of the ISO 10646 standard.
Upon publication 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.
To lead by example in the adoption of the ISO 10646 standard,
Government has announced the policy that, starting from February
2001 and where applicable, the ISO 10646 standard has become
a mandatory requirement in all government tenders for Chinese
computing products.
It is also the Government's long term policy to migrate government
computer systems to the ISO 10646 standard.
- ENDS -
|