"The introduction of international criteria for the codes for Chinese characters was necessary after the MSAR Government had outlined the goals and strategies for the development of e-government,"the Secretary for Administration and Justice, Florinda Chan, said today (6 April).

Florinda Chan attended the 19th meeting of the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG) of the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) this morning.

The main goal of the meeting was to collect information about Chinese ideographs used in different regions and to standardize codes.

Macao has been a member of the IRG since its 17th meeting. The MSAR Government created the Committee for Unification of Computer Chinese Character Encoding in 2000 to assist Macao in its participation in this international organisation.

During the past two years several public services and institutions have collected information and presented more than 1,300 ideographs, of which 22 characters specific to Macao would be proposed for IRG appreciation and integration in the ISO10646, which is a relatively new character set standard, published in 1993 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), with the title "Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set".

More than 50 delegates attended the 19th meeting of the IRG held in Macao from 6 to 9 May. The delegates came from different countries and regions, namelyx the PRC, Hong Kong, Japan, the Democratic PRK, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, the United States of America and Macao.

The IRG is a work group integrated within the ISO specialising in issues regarding the development of ideographic codes for the standard international codification of the ISO10646.

Zhang Zhoucai, engineer at the institute for the development of the telecommunications industry of the Ministry of Information Industry of the PRC, presided over the IRG. The IRG is an international group which holds sessions every six months.