HK Hosts Int'l Meeting on Ideographic CharactersThe 17th meeting of the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) kicked off Monday in Hong Kong.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 members, including the Chinese mainland, Singapore, Japan, the DPRK, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and the HKSAR, to work together on the development of ideographic characters in the ISO 10646 standard. The 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, Cheng Yan-chee, acting director of information technology services, said, "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." "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 Hong Kong SAR 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. |
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