This appendix provides information about the Unicode Consortium and its activities, particularly regarding publications other than the Unicode Standard. The Unicode Consortium publishes a number of technical standards and technical reports. Appendix B.2, Unicode Publications describes the kinds of reports in more detail.
The Unicode website also has many useful online resources.
B.1 The Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium was incorporated in January 1991, under the name Unicode, Inc., to promote the Unicode Standard as an international encoding system for information interchange, to aid in its implementation, and to maintain quality control over future revisions.
To further these goals, the Unicode Consortium cooperates with the Joint Technical Committee 1 of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC JTC1). It holds a Class C liaison membership with ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2; it participates in the work of both JTC1/SC2/WG2 (the technical working group for the subcommittee within JTC1 responsible for character set encoding) and the Ideographic Research Group (IRG). The Consortium is a member company of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards, Technical Committee L2 (INCITS/L2), an accredited U.S. standards organization. Many members of the Unicode Consortium have representatives in many countries who also work with other national standards bodies. In addition, a number of organizations are Liaison Members of the Consortium. For a list, see the Unicode website.
Membership in the Unicode Consortium is open to organizations and individuals anywhere in the world who support the Unicode Standard and who would like to assist in its extension and widespread implementation. Full, Institutional, Supporting, and Associate Members represent a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations in the computer and information processing industry. For a list, see the Unicode website. The Consortium is supported financially solely through membership dues and donations.
B.1.1 The Unicode Technical Committee
The Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) is the working group within the Consortium responsible for the creation, maintenance, and quality of the Unicode Standard. The UTC follows an open process in developing the Unicode Standard and its other technical publications. It coordinates and reviews all technical input to these documents and decides their contents. For more information on the UTC and the process by which the Unicode Standard and the other technical publications are developed, see:
B.1.2 Other Activities
Going beyond developing technical standards, the Unicode Consortium acts as registration authority for the registration of script identifiers under ISO 15924, and it has a technical committee dedicated to the maintenance of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). The repository contains a large and rapidly growing body of data used in the locale definition for software internationalization. For further information about these and other activities of the Unicode Consortium, visit:
B.2 Unicode Publications
In addition to the Unicode Standard, the Unicode Consortium publishes Unicode Technical Standards and Unicode Technical Reports. These materials are published as electronic documents only and, unlike Unicode Standard Annexes, do not form part of the Unicode Standard.
A Unicode Standard Annex (UAX) forms an integral part of the Unicode Standard, but is published online as a separate document. The Unicode Standard may require conformance to normative content in a Unicode Standard Annex, if so specified in the Conformance chapter of that version of the Unicode Standard. The version number of a UAX document is always the same as the version of the Unicode Standard of which it forms a part.
A Unicode Technical Standard (UTS) is an independent specification. Conformance to the Unicode Standard does not imply conformance to any UTS.
A Unicode Technical Report (UTR) contains informative material. Conformance to the Unicode Standard does not imply conformance to any UTR. Other specifications, however, are free to make normative references to a UTR.
In the past, some normative material was published as Unicode Technical Reports. Currently, however, such material is published either as a Unicode Technical Standard or a Unicode Standard Annex.
The Unicode website is the source for the most current version of all three categories of technical reports: