Conference attendees will learn about the latest features of version 3.1 of the Unicode Standard, released earlier this year. The highlight of the new release is the addition of 44,946 new encoded characters, including over 40,000 new ideographs for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This makes a grand total of 94,140 encoded characters in Unicode 3.1.
Sessions are devoted to the development of a standard for international domain names for the Internet, an area of current controversy. There is great demand for these domain names -- over a million names have been sold in Japanese, Chinese and other languages -- but there is, as yet, no Internet standard for these names. Without such a standard, the world-wide domain name system will not function across national boundaries.
The Unicode conference also will provide tutorials, sessions and panels addressing the latest on HTML, XML, CSS, .NET, Java, C++ and C#. An e-Business track will explore how Unicode is transforming global e-Commerce, and will offer case studies in B2B integration.
The Unicode Standard has become the foundation for all modern text processing. It is used on mainframes, PCs, portable devices, and for distributed processing across the Internet. The standard brings dramatic cost reductions to applications and enables the exchange of text in languages all over the world.
The conference is held every year in Silicon Valley in September, with additional conferences held at other locations around the world. The complete program and speaker biographies -- and registration information -- for the September conference can be found at: http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc19.
The following companies and organizations are sponsoring the conference: Agfa Monotype Corporation, Basis Technology Corporation, Lionbridge Technologies, Microsoft Corporation, Netscape Communications, Oracle Corporation, PeopleSoft, Inc., Progress Software Corp., Reuters Ltd., Sun Microsystems, Inc., Trigeminal Software, Inc., World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Wrox Press.
The Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium was founded as a non-profit organization in 1991. It is dedicated to the development, maintenance and promotion of The Unicode Standard, a worldwide character encoding. The Unicode Standard encodes the characters of the world's principal scripts and languages, and is code-for-code identical to the international standard ISO/IEC 10646. In addition to cooperating with ISO on the future development of ISO/IEC 10646, the Consortium is responsible for providing character properties and algorithms for use in implementations.
The membership base of the Unicode Consortium includes major computer corporations, governments, software producers, database vendors, research institutions, international agencies and various user groups:
Corporate Members
Adobe Systems, Inc.; Apple Computer, Inc.; Basis Technology Corporation; Compaq Computer Corporation; Government of India Ministry of Information Technology; Government of Pakistan, National Language Authority; Hewlett-Packard Company; IBM Corporation; Justsystem Corporation; Microsoft Corporation; NCR Corporation; Oracle Corporation; PeopleSoft, Inc.; Progress Software Corporation; The Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG); Reuters, Ltd.; RWS Group, LLC; SAP AG; Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Sybase, Inc.; Trigeminal Software, Inc.; Unisys Corporation.
Associate Members
Agfa Monotype Corporation; Beijing Zhong Yi Electronics Co.; BMC Software, Inc.; Booz, Allen, & Hamilton, Inc.; Cable & Wireless HKT Limited; CDAC -- Centre for Development of Advanced Computing; China Electronic Information Technology Ltd.; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Columbia University; Data Research Associates; DecoType, Inc.; Endeavor Information Systems, Inc.; eNIC Corporation; epixtech, Inc.; Ericsson Mobile Communications; eTranslate, Inc.; Ex Libris, Inc.; GlobalMentor, Inc.; GlobalSight Corporation; The Government of Tamil Nadu, India; i-DNS; i-EMAIL.net Pte Ltd; Innovative Interfaces, Inc.; Internet Mail Consortium; Langoo.com; Language Analysis Systems, Inc.; Language Technology Research Center; Netscape Communications; Nokia; Nortel Networks; Novell; OCLC, Inc.; Openwave Systems, Inc.; Optio Software; Palm, Inc.; Production First Software; The Royal Library, Sweden; Sagent Technology, Inc.; SAS Institute, Inc.; SHARE; Siebel Systems; SIL International; SIRSI Corporation; SLANGSOFT; Software AG; StarTV -- Satellite Television Asia Region Ltd.; Symbian, Ltd.; Uniscape, Inc.; Verisign Global Registry Services; VTLS, Inc.; WALID, Inc.; WordWalla, Inc.; Yet Another Society.
For further information on the Unicode Standard, visit the Unicode Web site at http://www.unicode.org or e-mail info@unicode.org.
