Introduction

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) is an emerging standard, bound to revolutionize the Internet and play a central role in the access and generation of online content, and thus reduce the digital divide in non-English speaking majority of Pakistan and across the world. This standard needs to be developed and deployed for all languages and would allow users to access domain names in local languages. More information on the standards is available in the research section of this website

This meeting will provide a platform for the discussion of policy and standardization issues relating to internationalizing domain names in Pakistani languages. Participants from various language communities will be invited to provide suggestions and share ideas on conclusions drawn in the previously held workshop.

The workshop will be divided into two sessions. On the first day, an open general public meeting will be held, where participants from all related fields of interest will be invited for discussions on IDN related matters for Pakistani languages. This will also be advertised in the newspapers for getting interested people involved. This will be followed on the second day by a closed meeting of a group of technical and language experts who will finalize these issues based on general public feedback.

Some of the major areas that need discussion and resolution are as follows.

• Characters required to represent each language
• Confusable characters within a language, and across languages
• Character(s) in these languages which are not represented in Unicode
• Choice of digits (Latin and/or Perso-Arabic)
• Label separator
• IDN ccTLD string for Pakistan (e.g. پاکستان، پاک، etc.) and gTLD translations
• Procedures/guidelines for the correct resolution of these characters encountered in an IDN (initial draft)

Purpose

The purpose of this meeting is to finalize language table and implementation details for IDNs in Pakistani languages.

Date and Venu

May 15-16 2009
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, 852-B, Faisal Town, Lahore

Acknowlegdement

The workshop is funded and supported by the National IT Development and Promotional Unit (NIDU) under the Ministry of Information Technology.