Archive - Year 2001

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Archive > Year 2001 > ITSD > Speeches and Presentations in Year 2001

Speech by Mr Y C Cheng, Acting Director of Information Technology Services, at the Welcome Dinner for the 17th Meeting of the Ideographic Rapporteur Group of the International Organization for Standardization
19 June 2001

Mr Zhang, Delegates, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good evening. It is a great pleasure for me to be with such a distinguished gathering of experts in the field of the ISO 10646 standard and ideographic characters from the Mainland, Japan, Macau, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, USA, Hong Kong, as well as the Unicode Consortium. I am also delighted to see the great turnout of Members of our Chinese Language Interface Advisory Committee.

A warm welcome to you all.

We organise this dinner as part of our hosting of the 17th meeting of the Ideographic Rapporteur Group, in short the IRG, of the International Organization for Standardization that is taking place here in Hong Kong between the 18th and 22nd of this month. The IRG is responsible for handling ideographic characters in the ISO 10646 standard. The standard is an important component of an IT infrastructure for ensuring the communication and exchange of electronic data in a compatible manner as far as the coding of characters is concerned.

Under the Digital 21 Strategy of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, we have established an open and common Chinese language interface that is based on the ISO 10646 standard and that caters for users who have a need to use Chinese on their IT systems and for electronic communication. By adopting the ISO 10646 standard, our common Chinese language interface allows users to conduct electronic communication in Chinese with enhanced data compatibility.

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has actively participated in the development of the ISO 10646 standard through the IRG. The current version of the ISO 10646 standard includes about two-thirds of the Chinese characters in the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set that is a collection of Chinese characters specific to Hong Kong. When the next release of the ISO 10646 is published by the end of this year, substantially all characters in the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set will be in the ISO 10646 standard, thus further facilitating the conduct of electronic communication and exchange of data including locally specific Chinese characters.

Just now at the cocktail reception, I was glad to see that cordial and earnest discussions were taking place among the IRG delegates, Members of the Chinese Language Interface Advisory Committee and our other distinguished guests. I am sure that this gathering provides a valuable opportunity for IRG delegates to learn about the latest development in respect of the Chinese computing environment here in Hong Kong and in other regions. For our guests from Hong Kong, it is an opportunity to gain more insight into the development of the ISO 10646 standard and to learn from IRG delegates the knowledge and experiences of handling ideographic characters in their respective local environments.

At the dinner progresses, I'm sure there will be more opportunities for you to exchange ideas and information of common interest.

Once again, thank you all for joining us tonight and please enjoy your dinner.

Thank you.

- ENDS -

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