Call for Participation! - The 36th Internationalization & Unicode Conference - October 22-24, 2012

The Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC) is the premier event covering the latest in industry standards and best practices for bringing software and Web applications to worldwide markets. This annual event focuses on software and Web globalization, bringing together internationalization experts, tools vendors, software implementers, and business and program managers from around the world.

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, tablets, etc.
• Publishing and broadcasting for a global audience
• Internationalized Domain Names and other identifiers
• Security concerns and practices
• 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
• HTML5 and HTML5-based applications
• 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
• ISO language tag issues

Regional Considerations

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

Tutorial presenters receive complimentary conference registration, and two nights lodging. Session presenters receive a fifty percent conference discount and two nights lodging.

To be considered as a presenter for the conference, please submit a brief abstract by the deadline of Friday, May 18th.

The Program Committee will notify authors by Friday, June 1st. Final presentation materials will be required from selected presenters by Friday, August 3.

Unicode Releases Common Locale Data Repository, Version 21.0.1

The Unicode CLDR 21.0.1 maintenance release is now available. See http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-21-0-1 for details.
The next major release is CLDR 22, scheduled for late August. The CLDR 22 release does involve general data submission, which will begin soon. For the latest schedule, see http://cldr.unicode.org .

Unicode CLDR Survey Tool Beta

March 21, 2012 — The Unicode CLDR Survey Tool is open for beta testing today. CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages, with the largest and most extensive standard repository of locale data available. The survey tool is an online tool used by organizations and individuals to contribute data to this repository, and to vote on alternative contributions.



The survey tool has undergone substantial revision, with dramatic improvements in performance and usability. We would appreciate people trying out the tool so that we can identify any remaining problems before we start data submission (currently scheduled for April 4). For more information, see http://goo.gl/7M1IG.

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Access

1. Production Survey Tool. If you have an existing survey tool account, you can go to the production tool at Production Survey Tool.
2. Smoke-Test Survey Tool. If you don’t have an account, you can still try out the survey tool using the Smoke Test version. It will create a test account automatically.
3. 
   

So that you can try out the tool as you wish, none of the data you enter during beta is saved.



The Smoke Test tool may be restarted at any time, because it used for development. If you get disconnected when this happens, then refresh your browser: all of your changes should be saved.

Guide

If you haven’t used the survey tool before, you may want to take a quick look at:

1. http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool/guide
2. http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool/walkthrough

This documentation should be updated in the next few days for some of the changes in UI.

How you can help

Visit and randomly vote and enter changes.

1. Pick your favorite locale
2. Visit different Sections of the locale (Code Lists, etc), and different pages in the Section.

1. Vote for different choices (including Proposed, Others, Abstain)
2. Change a value (Change column)
3. Try zooming on different columns (clicking on the following cells)
1. St (status, eg error/alert)
2. Draft (the approval status)
3. Voted (the voting status)
4. Proposed / Others (particular values)
5. (Clicking on Code shows some internals, not really user-focused item)
4. Reset your Coverage Level (at the top). (This changes how many items show).

3. Verify that data was accepted, or is rejected (appropriately) because of an error.
4. Periodically, refresh the entire page you are on and verify that items previously added remain visible.
5. Report any new issues at http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/newticket. (Skip those below). Please include the URL to the page where you found the error.

Known issues

Please read these over so you know what to skip:

1. Use FireFox/Safari/Chrome, not IE 8 or other browsers.
2. Some locales, such as English (en), are read-only.
3. Do not post comments in the ‘forums’ or try “Show Coverage”
4. Some generated examples use English instead of the local language, or the wrong currency.
5. The information in the “Code” column will be simplified during the beta process; some rows will move to different sections or pages.
6. There will be a bookmark on each row, for reference.
7. Other items may be added to this list during the beta period

What changed?

1. Page access is 10-30 times faster, depending on the operation.
2. Items are submitted individually (with Return/Enter), instead of having to submit a whole page.
3. Pages are not broken up into multiple subpages, simplifying navigation.
4. Errors and Warnings appear when you submit an item.
5. There is no “zoom” window; instead, zooming is in-place, with separate versions depending on what part of a row you click on.

Proposed Draft UTR #50, "Unicode Properties for Vertical Text Layout" has been updated to revision three. For instructions and information about commenting on this UTR, please see: http://www.unicode.org/review/pri207/

Updates include:

• Mongolian and Egyptian Hieroglyphs changed to U.
• Implementation of recent UTC decisions
  • Removal of the East Asian Class property
  • East Asian Orientation renamed East Asian Vertical Orientation
  • New property, Default Vertical Orientation

PRI #182: Unicode Regular Expressions: new proposed update

UTS #18, Unicode Regular Expressions provides the foundation for handling Unicode characters in regular expression engines, a key component of many programs and programming languages.

There are significant additions and changes in the new proposed update of this specification, with the addition of Name_Alias matching, matching rules from UAX #44, use of the new Script_Extensions property, new recommended properties, a compact form of \u{...}, alignment of rule RL1.4 with Appendix C, and the incorporation of text for PRI #179.

There are several of review notes requesting feedback on particular issues. Please submit feedback on those and the rest of this document by May 1 for consideration at the UTC meeting starting on May 7. For details, see:

http://www.unicode.org/review/pri182/

PRI #208, #209: Unicode Security: new proposed updates

UTR #36, Unicode Security Considerations and UTS #39, Unicode Security Mechanisms provide guidance and mechanisms to help deal with Unicode Security issues.

There are significant additions and changes in the new proposed updates of these specifications. The definition of Restriction Levels has moved from UTR #36 to UTS #39, which also adds two new conformance clauses and specifications for Restriction Levels and mixed number detection, an amended specification for mixed script detection, and updates for Unicode 6.1.

There are several of review notes requesting feedback on particular issues. Please submit feedback on those and the rest of this document by May 1 for consideration at the UTC meeting on May 7. For details, see:

http://www.unicode.org/review/pri208/
http://www.unicode.org/review/pri209/

New version of Unicode Ideographic Variation Database released

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce the release of version 2012-03-02 of the Unicode Ideographic Variation Database (IVD). This release adds 32 new sequences to the registered Adobe-Japan1 collection, and 8,850 new sequences to the registered Hanyo-Denshi collection. It also introduces a new datafile called IVD_Stats.txt that details Ideographic Variation Sequence (IVS) and Variation Selector (VS) usage for the entire IVD and on a per-collection basis. Details can be found at http://www.unicode.org/ivd/.

IUC 36: October 22-24, 2012, Santa Clara, CA, USA

The Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC) is the premier event covering the latest in industry standards and best practices for bringing software and Web applications to worldwide markets. This annual event focuses on software and Web globalization, bringing together internationalization experts, tools vendors, software implementers, and business and program managers from around the world.

Expert practitioners and industry leaders present detailed recommendations for businesses looking to expand to new international markets and those seeking to improve time to market and cost-efficiency of supporting existing markets. Recent conferences have provided specific advice on designing software for European countries, Latin America, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and emerging markets.

This highly rated conference features excellent technical content, industry-tested recommendations and updates on the latest standards and technology. Subject areas include cloud computing, upgrading to HTML5, integrating with social networking software, and implementing mobile apps. This year's conference will also highlight new features in Unicode Version 6.1 and other relevant standards published this year. Reasons to Attend Include:

• tutorials and sessions for beginners, to train you and your staff on basic practices and implementation techniques for creating international software 
• learn recommended solutions to difficult problems or sophisticated requirements from industry leaders and experts in attendance 
• find help from tool and product vendors to get you to market quickly and cost-effectively 

Click here for more information.