HK Adopts International Standards to Enhance E-Business Infrastructure

The government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) adopts international standards to enhance the e-business infrastructure.

Speaking at a conference on international character encoding standards here Thursday, Cheng Yan-chee, acting director of information technology services, said that an infrastructure that supports e-business through the adoption of international standards is a very important factor for success.

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.

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

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 standardization in coding and use," he said.

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.






People's Daily Online --- http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/