Date: 5 Aug 2014
Time: 15:30 – 17:00
Venue: Tapas 1
Remote Participation LInks: Video / Text / Adobe Connect
| Workshop Title | Bringing diverse linguistic communities together for a unified IDN ruleset |
| Thematic Area of Interest | Enabling support for linguistic diversity on the Internet |
| Specific Issues of Discussions & Description | Why this Workshop?The root zone of the Internet is expanding to include a wide range of new labels, including Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). This represents not only a remarkable step forward towards the promotion of linguistic diversity on the Internet but also creates new opportunities to define rules for use of different scripts to represent labels. The process requires input from linguistic communities to ensure that scripts and languages are represented accurately and comprehensively in the root of the Internet.As one of the first steps, ICANN being the organization chartered with coordinating domain names at the root of the Internet, is currently implementing the Procedure to Develop and Maintain the Label Generation Rules (LGR) for the DNS Root Zone in Respect of IDNA Labels, which involves the community in framing a set of rules for safe and reliable access of the IDNs over the Internet.Neo-Brahmi ScriptsWith its vast diversity of languages (22 official languages written in 10 scripts), India is a major area of interest in terms of the challenges its complex scripts pose. However, underlying this diversity is a unity, since with the exception of Urdu, all the major scripts are derived from Brahmi and retain the guiding principle of the original script. This is why it would be useful if all the Neo-Brahmi script communities collaborate in proposing the unified rule-set.
What is it all about? This workshop will focus on various aspects of creation of this Label Generation Ruleset for the Neo-Brahmi scripts. Some of the potential areas are: – the broad approach to be followed while formulating these rules. – user experience implications of presence/absence of such rules. – the need for focused community participation and how to create such participation. The workshop will have two thematic cores: The inner core will focus on the work to undertake such a task and the efforts to bring together experts to define such rules and also the challenges to achieve such task. In other words, the linguistic infrastructure. The outer core involves sharing of views from the Industry experts closely working in the area of domain names at large, Internet enabled applications and IDNs. These are Registrars, Registry and above all the consumers: the industry at large, especially the browser developers, to name a few. |
| Expected Format and Target Panel Members | Target panelists:
Following that, there will be a 15 minutes panel-discussion. |
| Workshop Organiser | Akshat Joshi: Project Engineer, C-DACNeha Gupta: Senior Technical Officer, C-DACNaela Sarras: IDN Manager, ICANN |