Introduction

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are sure to extend the reach of the Internet to all the linguistic communities, and make it truly global. Development of this protocol has been a laborious process, which has taken a decade to mature, and is now being approved as this report goes for printing. The main challenges in the development of IDNs have been the need to keep the existing highly distributed Internet stable and secure as the namespace expands, while concurrently supporting a variety of writing systems, those encoded in Unicode and those which will be encoded in the future. This standard needs to be developed and deployed for all languages and would allow users to access domain names in local languages.

Considerable work has been done in this context for Pakistani languages. Two workshops have been organized at NUCES previously to engage various linguistic and technical experts from all over Pakistan to discuss and finalize the deployment issues for IDNs in Pakistani languages. Minutes of the second workshop are available at http://www.moitt.gov.pk/.

This is in continuation of the workshop held at the NUCES in May 2009 and is aimed at finalizing a single language table for پاکستان. IDN ccTLD. Participants from various language communities are invited to provide suggestions and share ideas on conclusions drawn in the previously held workshop.

Some of the major anticipated outcomes of this meeting are as follows.

• Single language table listing complete set of characters required to represent all languages of Pakistan
• Normalization table for characters in language table
• Extended normalization table for characters in language table
• Variant table corresponding to the language table

Date and Venu

March 27, 2010
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.