Unicode Releases Common Locale Data Repository, Version 1.7

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh gmail com>]

Hi all,

Just wanted to tell you that the Unicode Consortium released CLDR 1.7
last week (full announcement below). GNOME is a member of the Unicode
Consortium, and we plan to use more of CLDR data in GNOME and vice
versa.

I am working with Behdad (GNOME's other representative to the Unicode
Consortium) on how to proceed with this and I will announce updates
here as we go forward.

As always, feel free to contact me if I could help with anything
Unicode-related.

Roozbeh
-----------------------------------

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, 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/.

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/).