ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG20 N079

Title: NP on cultural elements and registry

Source: WG20

Date: 1992-04-23

Status: WG contribution

Project: JTC1.22.30

Action: for WG15 and SC22 to decide.

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Here a draft for a NP. It is in the form required by FORM 3 of the
ISO/IEC Directives for a New work item Proposal.

1. Title
--------

Specification and registration of cultural elements.

2. Scope
--------

The work is to produce a multi-part standard for how to specify culturally
dependent information, including:

- character attributes, e.g. as upper- or lowercase letters, letters, control
  characters, punctuation marks, digits, hexadecimal digits.

- short character identifier attributes, which should be mnemonic, if
  possible, culturally independent and drawn from invariant ISO 646.

- specification of relations between characters, eg the mapping from 
  lower case to upper case letters, and vice versa.

- Specification of collation of strings of characters.

- Specification of formats, including:

            date and time formats

            monetary issues

            numeric issues

- Specification of affirmative/negative answer

The standard will also include procedures for registrations of
collections of the above items.

3. Purpose and justification
----------------------------

JTC1 has assigned the project JTC1.22.30 "Functionality for 
Internationalization of Applications" for development to JTC1/SC22 in its WG20. 
The project include the above mentioned items. 

It is proposed to make a subdivision of the project to produce a 
multi-part standard
with the specific contents here mentioned. It is expected that the
work will support the work on internationalization
already done in ISO/IEC 9945-2 2nd CD POSIX Shell and utilities.

4. Programme of Work
--------------------

A multipart international standard is expected to be developed
for this project.

5. Relevant documents to be considered
--------------------------------------

ISO/IEC 9945-2 2. CD POSIX Shell and Utilities
ISO/IEC 10646 2. DIS Universal Multi-Octed Coded Character Set

6. Cooperation and liaison
--------------------------

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 Character sets and Information coding
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG15 POSIX
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 WGs


7. Preparatory work offered with taget date(s)
----------------------------------------------

A draft will be circulated to SC22/WG20 in June 1992.

A CD document will be ready for ballot by March 1993.

A DIS document will be ready by January 1994.

An IS can be available by October 1994.

Keld Simonsen (Denmark) is volunteering to edit this draft.

There will be a need for a service of a maintenance agency
or registration authority for this project.
A potential candidate has been identified, namely the
Danish UNIX-systems User Group, Denmark.

There are no known requirements for coding for this proposed standard.

The proposed standard does not concern known patented items.