L2/06-005

Date: January 10, 2006
Source: Richard Cook <rscook@berkeley.edu>
Subject: Report on IRG #25

IRG meeting #25 was held from 2005.11.28-2005.12.02, in exotic 
Berkeley, on the campus of the University of California. Deborah 
Anderson and I attended, as US and L2 representatives, and Kobayashi 
Tatsuo and Tom Bishop were present as individual participants.

Member body participants were from China, Taiwan, HK SAR, Japan, 
South Korea, and Vietnam. Macao SAR, North Korea, and Singapore did 
not attend.

The meeting was sponsored by The Unicode Consortium, in conjunction 
with the UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley 
Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley Institute of East Asian 
Studies, UC Berkeley East Asian Library, and the UC Berkeley Script 
Encoding Initiative. Special thanks to Debbie Anderson, who made most 
of the meeting arrangements, and to Magda Danish, who assisted in 
meeting logistics.

Meeting documents are available on the IRG website
<http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/>.

Meeting #26 is planned for June 2006 in Hue, Vietnam (see IRGN1157 
for current planning info). Meetings #27 and #28 are still expected 
to be hosted by Taiwan and China, respectively.

Work in the IRG #25 meeting centered on development of Extension C1, 
with special focus on improving quality by means of additional error 
checking and source mappings. For error checking, much time was spent 
on IDS (contributions by Taichi Kawabata; see N1153,N1154). In the 
end, it was agreed that the current CJK_C1_v52 repertory would be 
reevaluated by the editors, to determine a stable subset. See the 
meeting resolutions: <http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg25/ 
IRGN1158Resolutions.pdf>

In addition to C1 work, the repertory of characters to augment the 
existing CJK Strokes block was refined. Further details of this work 
are forthcoming in a proposal to WG2 currently being completed.

In plenary, I gave a demo of my extensive CJK variant mapping table, 
in use for fuzzy searching on ancient Chinese text, using Plane 16 
PUA mappings of Seal forms in Wenlin's CDL system. Wenlin Institute 
provided essential support for this work, as it has for development 
of the CJK Strokes repertory, aimed at providing the IRG with a more 
perfect tool for collaborative C1 development. For more information 
on CDL, see http://wenlin.com.

The Old Hanzi ad hoc continues to explore the development of a 
standard repertory of inscriptional forms. This work is still in its 
very early stages, but has decided to focus on the development of a 
repertory for Oracle Bone Inscriptions.

ALso in plenary, Rick McGowan gave a presentation on the Cuneiform 
Encoding Project, as a point of reference for the Old Hanzi group. 
And Debbie Anderson presented a "Short Report from the Script 
Encoding Initiative", aimed at providing an introduction to the 
encoding process outside of IRG.

-----------------------
Dr. Richard S. Cook
STEDT Project
Linguistics Department
University of California at Berkeley
http://stedt.berkeley.edu