Group: International Macintosh Users Group (IMUG)
(A Forum for Multilingual / Multiscript Computing)
Date: February 17, 2005, 7-9 p.m.
Speaker: Deborah Anderson, Ph.D (UC Berkeley)
Topic: Diversifying the Web for all the World's Languages
Location: Apple Computer, Apple Campus, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino
Take Saratoga/Sunnyvale exit off 280, turn South to
Cupertino, turn left onto Mariani Avenue, left into
Infinite Loop.
Admission: $4; free for IMUG members
Contact: Roger Sherman, (650) 859-5981
roger [dot] sherman [at] sri [dot] com


The Web offers a valuable means of communication in the many
languages of the world, but over eighty writing systems used by the
world's languages are not yet included in Unicode, the international
character encoding standard supported (or required) by the Web
standards XML and HTML. To remedy the situation, a project was
established at UC Berkeley, the Script Encoding Initiative. It aims
to help get into Unicode those ancient and modern scripts which are
still not included. The project involves close collaboration with
linguists, user communities, and other groups, and has received
support from UNESCO and the NEH. The results of the effort will have
an important impact on education, literacy, research, and other areas
of communication, and will help open the Web to a much greater
audience.

Deborah Anderson is project leader for the Script Encoding Initiative
at UC Berkeley and a researcher in the Dept. of Linguistics. She is
the representative to the Unicode Consortium for UC Berkeley and the
Linguistic Society of America. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in
Indo-European Studies and in her spare time serves as president of
the Archaeological Institute of America, San Francisco Society.