Unicode Version 6.0 - Complete Text of Core Specification Published

Mountain View, CA, February 17, 2011 - The Unicode® Consortium is pleased to announce the publication of the final text of the core specification for Unicode 6.0. The Unicode 6.0 core specification includes information on scripts newly encoded in Unicode 6.0, as well as many updates and clarifications to other sections of the text. The release of the core specification completes the definitive documentation of the Unicode Standard, Version 6.0

In Version 6.0, the standard grew by 2,088 characters. Over 1,000 of these characters are symbols used for text exchange on mobile phones. The Unicode Standard now also includes the recently created official symbol for the Indian rupee. After computers and mobile phones update to Version 6.0, the rupee sign will be available for use like the $ or € now.

In addition, this version adds many CJK Unified Ideographs in common use in China, Taiwan, and Japan,as well as characters for African language support, including extensions to the Tifinagh, Ethiopic,and Bamum scripts. Three scripts are supported for the first time: Mandaic, Batak, and Brahmi.

In October of 2010, the other portions of Unicode 6.0 were released: the Unicode Standard Annexes, code charts, and the Unicode Character Database. This allowed vendors to update their implementations of Unicode 6.0 as quickly as possible.

For more information on all of The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/

Call for Participation: 35th Internationalization and Unicode Conference

Mountain View, CA, USA – February 8, 2011 – The Unicode® Consortium today announced a call for participation in the Thirty-fifth Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC 35), taking place in Santa Clara, Calif., USA; October 17-19, 2011, sponsored by Adobe. The conference is produced by OMG®.

This is the premier conference on technologies and practices for the creation and management of global and multilingual software solutions. This annual event is praised for its excellent technical content, industry-tested recommendations and updates on the latest standards.

The Program Committee is soliciting proposals for presentations that describe cases studies, best practices, effective software design, innovative technology, or important standards. Tutorial presentations are also welcome. Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:

Application Areas

• Designing software platforms, operating systems, software as a service, (SAAS), or programming environments
• Social networks
• Search engines, SEO, discovery and navigation best practices
• Websites and web services
• Libraries and education
• Mobile applications, including iPhone, Android, iPad, Kindle, Windows Mobile, etc.
• Publishing and broadcasting for a global audience
• Internationalized Domain Names and other identifiers
• Security concerns and practices
• Semantic Web
• Voice to text, text to voice
• Machine translation
• Unicode, encodings, scripts, character properties, and algorithms

General Techniques

• Advances in technologies, algorithms or methodologies
• Using internationalization libraries and programming environments
• Handling bidirectional or other complex scripts
• Dealing with data formats: XML, JSON, HTML5, DITA, and upcoming standards
• Project management and methodologies for global development teams e.g. Agile
• Best practices in localization process and technology
• Best practices in world-ready development, test, and deployment
• Improving globalization capabilities within organizations
• Approaches for migrating legacy applications to global markets
• Font development and Typography

Culture and Technology

• Endangered Languages
• Unencoded Languages
• Case studies and research on cross-culture communication
• Digital Divide

Regional Considerations

• Languages of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East
• Locales and the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR)
• Emoji support

Details of the call for participation are available at: http://www.unicodeconference.org/iuc35call . Interested individuals or organizations are invited to submit a brief (up to 600 word) abstract of their proposed conference presentation by Friday, March 25 using this web form: http://www.unicodeconference.org/abstracts .

The Program Committee will notify authors by Wednesday, April 20. Final presentation materials will be required from selected presenters by Wednesday, August 3. The conference agenda will be available by Wednesday, May 4 at: http://www.unicodeconference.org/ .

Sponsorships and exhibit space are available; for more information on sponsoring contact Ken Berk at ken.berk@omg.org, +1-781-444 0404. For exhibiting questions email event_marketing@omg.org. For all other questions email info@unicodeconference.org .

For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium
http://www.unicode.org/contacts.html .

About the Event Producer

OMG® is the Event Producer for the Internationalization & Unicode Conferences. OMG is an open membership, not-for-profit consortium that produces and maintains computer industry specifications for interoperable enterprise applications. Our specifications include MDA®, UML®, CORBA®, MOF™, XMI® and CWM™. OMG’s specifications are all available for download by everyone without charge.

For more information about OMG, visit us online at http://www.omg.org .

Note to editors: Unicode Standard, Unicode and the Unicode Logo are trademarks of Unicode, Inc. Unicode Consortium is a registered trademark of Unicode, Inc. OMG and Object Management Group are trademarks of Object Management Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Opening of Data Submission for CLDR 2.0

The Unicode Consortium is announcing the opening of data submission for the 2.0 release of Unicode CLDR, the Common Locale Data Repository. Data for the CLDR project is collected via the CLDR survey tool.

The CLDR survey tool is at http://unicode.org/cldr/apps/survey

The data submission is currently scheduled to run from now until March 9, 2011, after which the data will go into vetting mode in order to resolve any conflicts that may occur in the data.

If you plan to submit data for the 2.0 release of CLDR you will need a login ID and password associated with your e-mail address.

1. If you have used ST in a previous release of CLDR, your login ID and password are still active.

2. If you need to set up a new account, please see the instructions at http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool/accounts

A summary of the new features in 2.0 release of CLDR survey tool is at http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool/survey-tool-2-0-new-features

Unicode CLDR announces Survey Tool 2.0 BETA

The Unicode Consortium is announcing the beta test release of the survey tool for data submission for the 2.0 release of Unicode CLDR, the Common Locale Data Repository.

The CLDR survey tool is at http://unicode.org/cldr/apps/survey

The beta test period allows users to get comfortable with and provide feedback on the user interface before attempting to input real data. Any data entered during the BETA period will be discarded. The CLDR committee plans to switch over to production mode on Monday February 7, 2011, unless we find some critical error during beta period that would prevent that.

If you plan to submit data for the 2.0 release of CLDR you will need a login ID and password associated with your e-mail address.

1. If you have used ST in a previous release of CLDR, your login ID and password are still active.

2. If you need to set up a new account, please see the instructions at http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool/accounts

A summary of the new features in 2.0 release of CLDR survey tool is at http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool/survey-tool-2-0-new-features

Public Review Issue #178: Collation Rules for Non-Latin Scripts in Unicode CLDR

The Unicode CLDR Technical Committee has posted a new issue for public review and comment. Details are on the following web page:

http://www.unicode.org/review/pri178/

Review period for the new item closes on February 28, 2011.

Please see the page for links to discussion and relevant documents. Briefly, the new issue is:

PRI #178 Collation Rules for Non-Latin Scripts in Unicode CLDR

In Unicode CLDR 1.9 and earlier versions, the collation order for given languages changes the order of characters within a script, but doesn't change the order of scripts. In Unicode CLDR 2.0 and later versions, there is the capability to customize the collation order by re-ordering one or more scripts with respect to other scripts. The proposal addressed by this Public Review Issue is to change the customized collation order for certain languages in the Unicode CLDR data tables.

If you have comments for official consideration, please post them by submitting your comments through the Unicode CLDR reporting form:

http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/newticket

If you wish to discuss issues on the Unicode CLDR mail list, then please use the following link to subscribe (if necessary). Please be aware that discussion comments on the mail list are not automatically recorded as input to the technical committee. You must use the reporting link above to generate comments for consideration.

http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html