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ICANN Explores India's Pioneering Work on IDNs

Nation's work on Internationalized Domain Names has lessons for global project

12 February 2008

NEW DELHI , INDIA: The Indian experience with Internationalized Domain Names and possible lessons for global implementation of IDNs will be front and center at a workshop at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers 31st International Public Meeting slated for 13 February 2008 at 11 am local time.

"ICANN's IDN program is about making close to 100,000 characters from the languages of the world available at the top level – the part after the dot -- so users can benefit from a domain name in fully localized language or script," said Tina Dam, ICANN's IDN Program Directorr. " India has 22 official languages and has done a great deal of foundation work on how languages and scripts – or the collection of characters used in a language – can be categorized and used. There are a lot of lessons for the world coming out of the work being done in India."

Because different languages can share similar characters and scripts, there are numerous technical and policy issues on how they would be handled and used in domain names. Much work has been done on this in India.

The IDNs in Indian Languages and Scripts workshop will cover the following topics:

* An Introduction To Indian Languages, and Scripts
* Development of Language Tables, Policy Issues for Indic Scripts
* Indian Languages in Computer Applications
* Status of Indian Language Deployment in Operating Systems
* Status of Indian Language Deployments in Computer Applications

"As ICANN moves forward to making the scripts and languages of the world available in all levels of domain names, the work being done in India, and the lessons learned, willl make an immeasurable contribution to the people of the world being able to get their name in their language for their Internet," Dam said.