People use collation in their daily lives: finding names in a phone book, perusing a library card catalog, reading a book index. As such, people have expectations on where to find information within a structure. What complicates the process is the fact that these expectations vary from culture to culture. In addition, people have implicit knowledge of the correctness of collation (is it right or wrong?), but generally cannot explain what the rules of correctness are.

In a properly globalized product, users will have properly collated data-e.g., in the file system, in a database, in an e-mail address book. How should implementers go about ensuring culturally-correct collation in product? What are the basic linguistic issues of collation, and how do they manifest themselves in technology?

This presentation will explain the basic tenets of collation in language, debunk some myths about collation in globalized software, show how collation functions are used (using examples from the Win32 API), and touch upon best practices. This talk will be a good introduction to the concepts covered by Mark Davis' presentation, immediately following.