[Unicode Announcement] Unicode Releases Common Locale Data Repository, Version 1.7

From: announcements@unicode.org
Date: Fri May 08 2009 - 18:33:19 CDT

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      Mountain View, CA, May 8, 2009 - The Unicode® Consortium announced
    today the release of the new version of the Unicode Common Locale Data
    Repository* (Unicode CLDR 1.7)*, providing key building blocks for
    software to support the world's languages. Unicode CLDR is by far the
    largest and most extensive standard repository of locale data. This data
    is used by a wide spectrum of companies for their software
    internationalization and localization: adapting software to the
    conventions of different languages for such common software tasks as
    formatting of dates, times, time zones, numbers, and currency values;
    sorting text; choosing languages or countries by name; transliterating
    different alphabets; and many others.

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    CLDR 1.7 contains data for 146 languages and 159 territories: 468
    locales in all. Version 1.7 of the repository contains over 21% more
    locale data than the previous release, with over 40,000 new or modified
    data items from over 140 different contributors. Major contributors to
    CLDR 1.7 include Adobe, Apple, Google, IBM, and Sun, plus official
    representatives from a number of countries. Many other organizations and
    volunteers around the globe, including Gnome, Kotoistus, LISA,
    OpenOffice, and Utilika, have also made important contributions. The
    data for CLDR is gathered through the CLDR Survey Tool
    <http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool>, which allows organizations
    and volunteers to contribute, compare, and vet locale data. In the
    development of this release, the process of gathering data was sped up,
    and the voting process was simplified.

    The new features of Unicode CLDR 1.7 include:

        * New and improved data, including Indic data.
        * Enhanced number system support, including many non-decimal formats
          as well as spelled-out forms ("twenty-three")
        * Postal code format validity
        * New IETF BCP 47 (RFC 4646) support
        * Calendar preference data
        * Improved language population data, and language-script mapping data
        * Local DTD access
        * Improved currency symbols
        * Clarified specification of timezone parsing

    Unicode CLDR 1.7 is part of the Unicode locale data project, together
    with the Unicode Locale Data Markup Language (LDML:
    http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/). LDML is an XML format used for
    general interchange of locale data, such as in Microsoft's .NET. For web
    pages with different views of CLDR data, see
    http://unicode.org/cldr/charts.html.

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    For more information about the Unicode CLDR project (including charts)
    see http://cldr.unicode.org. The latest features of CLDR will also be
    showcased at the 33rd * Internationalization and Unicode Conference*
    (IUC) on October 14-16, 2009 in San Jose, CA — see
    http://unicodeconference.org/ <http://www.unicodeconference.org/>.

    About the Unicode Consortium

    The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop,
    extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization
    standards. The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum
    of corporations and organizations in the computer and information
    processing industry: Adobe Systems, Apple, DENIC eG, Google, Government
    of India, Government of Tamil Nadu, IBM, Microsoft, Monotype Imaging,
    NetApp, Oracle, SAP, Society for Natural Language Technology Research,
    Sun Microsystems, Sybase, The University of California at Berkeley,
    Yahoo!, plus well over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members.

    For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium
    (http://unicode.org/ <http://www.unicode.org/>).

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