Title: Draft revised Business Plan of CEN/TC304
Source: Chair and Secretary of CEN/TC304
Date: 15 October 1999
Action: This is a revised BP (see N904) and disposition of comments in N918. This BP is sent to TC 304 members for information and to CEN/CS for CEN/BT for approval.

The extension of formal business planning to CEN Technical Committees (CEN/TCs) is an important measure which forms part of a major review of business processes (known as ‘Optimization’). The aim is to align the CEN work programme with expressed market needs and to ensure the adequate resourcing of projects through their development stages in the CEN/TCs. Your role in the implementation of the Business Planning concept will contribute significantly to the overall effectiveness of European standardization.

The foremost aim of European standardization is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services though the elimination of technical barriers to trade.

The use of standards by industry and the social and economic partners is always voluntary; however, European standards are sometimes related to European legislation (Directives), and conformity to such standards may constitute a presumption of conformity to the legal requirements of the Directives (which must be met by manufacturers before certain products can be traded legally within the Single Market).

Three bodies are responsible for the planning, development and adoption of European standards: CEN (European Committee for Standardization) is responsible for all sectors excluding electrotechnical, which is the responsibility of CENELEC (European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization), and most of the Information and Communications Technologies, which are largely the responsibility of ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute).

CEN is a legal association, the members of which are the National Standards Bodies (NSBs) of nineteen European countries and six Associates (organizations representing social and economic interests at European level), supported by a Central Secretariat based in Brussels. It is the European counterpart of ISO (International Organization for Standardization) with which it has a standing protocol (the ‘Vienna Agreement’) to facilitate technical co-operation.

The principal deliverable of CEN is the European standard (EN), which must be published by each of NSBs as an identical national standard, with any pre-existing national standards in conflict being withdrawn.

A European standard embodies the essential principles of global openness and transparency, consensus, technical coherence and national commitment. These are safeguarded through its development in a CEN Technical Committee (CEN/TC), representative of all interested parties, supported by a public comment phase (the CEN Enquiry). CEN and its Technical Committees are also able to offer the European pre-standard (ENV) and the informative CEN Report (CR) as solutions to market needs.

More recently, CEN has created the CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) as a deliverable which aims to bridge the gap between the activities of consortia and the formal process of standardization represented by CEN and its national members. An important distinction is that the CWA is developed by CEN Workshops, comprising only participants with direct interest, and so it is not accorded the status of a European standard.

Recognising the importance of market certainty in the use of European standards, CEN and CENELEC jointly offer a European Mark (the Keymark), which is a third-party certification mark through which compliance with

Standardization in the field of information technology as applied to character sets, to ensure that European requirements are satisfied. The work will be in the areas of the identification, manipulation and coded representation of character data and in its input, interchange and rendition by electronic means.

The new scope was proposed and discussed in the 12th plenary meeting of CEN/TC304 in Reykjavík 10 June 1998 (see document CEN/TC 304 N812), with representatives from 9 CEN National bodies present and 3 CEN affiliated National bodies: UK, France, Germany, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Greece, Finland, Iceland, Romania, Poland and Lithuania. A resolution on the text of the scope was taken (see document CEN/TC304 N831).

M12 Resolution 6 - Scope of TC/304

CEN/TC304 resolves that the new title of CEN/TC304 calls for changes to be made to the current scope, where the words "ICT" and "localization" should be referred to, and the concept of "localization" explained. The following text is proposed, which the Secretary is to submit to the CEN/BT for approval.

New English title as approved by CEN/BT: (in English)

‘Information and Communications Technologies - European Localization Requirements’

New scope:

Adopted unanimously

 

The German TC304 members have translated the title and scope as follows:

German title:

Lokale europäische Anforderungen

Scope in German:

Normung auf dem Gebiet der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie, um die erforderlichen lokalen europäischen Anforderungen auf diesem Gebiet zu wahren. Lokale europäische Anforderungen umfassen in diesem Zusammenhang die Bereitstellung von Software und Hardware, die an die linguistischen und kulturellen Bedürfnisse in Europa angepaßt ist.

(A French CEN/TC304 translation of the scope will be added as soon as it becomes available)

It is generally understood that ease-of-use is a key concept in the present day ICT market (Information and Communication Technologies market). To bring out successful new products and to deepen further the market for existing products this means that software must be able to adapt to linguistic and cultural expectations of its users.

To tailor a new product to the needs of a new market is expensive and because of the short lifetime of computer products, the time delay may mean that the product is out of date when introduced to the market.

Political, economical, social, technical, legal and international factors that either directly require some or all of the standardisation activities proposed by the CEN/TC, or significantly influence the way these activities are carried out are the following:

1 Political factors:

There are strong political motivations in Europe for supporting standardisation that enables multilingualism. The following represent the key facts together with examples on how they might influence standardisation:

The commitment of the European Union to make all its legislation available in all official languages of its members and where appropriate of the EEA. This has for instance led to the development of terminology databases to enable consistent translations of legal texts.

The policy of the EU is to keep the European Common Market multilingual in spite of economical convergence. This has for instance led to availability of funding for the work of CEN/TC304 in the name of protection of cultural diversity because market forces are in many instances pushing in the opposite direction.

The bill of rights of minority languages issued by the Council of Europe including measures for their recognition and public use. This may lead to added linguistic requirements on computer systems

The Bangemann report and its influence on EU research in turning the challenges of a multilingual community into an economical advantage in global multilingual competition. This has led to a variety of human language technologies and de-facto standards to be made for the languages of CEN members and relevant affiliated CEN members.

2 Economical factors

Savings through using standards are a prime motivation for their creation. An example of which is the large reduction in cost of computer keyboards for different languages that has been realised in the last decades that can in part be attributed to the emergence of international standards in that area.

The computer vendors are mostly US companies with a global customer base and standards in "internationalisation" need to be global. The market for computer equipment is however largely limited to the most technologically developed nations and Europe is often quoted as being one third of the market, with the US and Asia with the remaining two thirds. Members of CEN and relevant affilated CEN members are therefore important customer of these standards and have much interest in ensuring that they meet their requirements for localisation.

The cost for the user of not having computers linguistically adapted to their needs, resulting for instance in time-consuming corrections of documents when characters disappear in email, is hard to estimate. It is however likely that the cost of standardisation is insignificant in comparison.

3 Social factors

Language and cultural differences are often linked to pride and national identity and ignoring them within the European common market may cause alienation and dissatisfaction of its members.

The removal of linguistical barriers for participation in the European information society is desirable for obvious social reasons.

4 Technical factors

The speed with which technology has been evolving and the short life span of software and hardware has increased the need for fast and reliable, yet also cheap language localisation.

The convergence of technologies in telephony and data interchange has broadened the scope of computer cultural adaptation. Telephones are evolving into handheld computers with similar linguistic capabilities. The telephone industry is mostly European and TC304 may potentially play a role in harmonising standards in this field with IT standards.

5 Legal factors

Legislation exists in some European countries on some aspects of IT handling of languages. For instance allowing citizens to write their names in official records with all the characters given at birth, including diacritical marks. Pan-European legislation is of less importance, but the emergence of Pan-European data-bases for instance for use in the Schengen zone, may bring forth legal requirements and specifications for linguistical capabilities of European computer systems.

6 International trade and standardisation factors

Large computer vendors are highly dependent upon being able to launch products into the global market that meet a wide range of requirements. They have built their own registries with information and procedures for some automatic tailoring of their products to different markets.

IT-vendors have formed the industrial consortium UNICODE together with other interested parties, for doing work on character technology. This work has been extended into other language specifications, such as ordering rules.

ISO/IEC JTC1 has established a Technical direction for Cultural Adaptability in IT. Work within ISO/IEC JTC1 has in some instances taken over work that was started in CEN/TC304. Work in ISO/IEC JTC1 includes an international registry for cultural requirements and alphabetical ordering rules; standardisation on input interfaces and characters set technology. ISO/IEC JTC1 has harmonised its work on the ISO/IEC 10646 character set standard with that of UNICODE.

Work in ISO TC46 and ISO TC37, for instance on defining country and language codes is also relevant to CEN/TC304 because they are used to identify "locales".

Work in many of ETSI's committees is also of much importance to cultural adaptation and ties between CEN/TC304 and the telecommunication industry need to be strengthened.

The scope of CEN/TC304 is to ensure that European requirement are satisfied and this is often best achieved by forwarding specifications to the above mentioned committees.

Based on the considerations above, the CEN/TC 304 proposes the following objectives and strategic directions for its future work:

Objectives of the CEN/TC 304

Ensuring that European localization requirements can be satisfied includes specifying European sub-sets of global requirements. As a Technical Committee set up to deliver formal standard deliverables the main objective of CEN/TC304 is the elaboration of standards on common cultural requirements in a larger European context. These should however, when possible, take the form of profiles of international standards where these exist. These standards are aimed at the common multilingual European environment of the common market.

More concretely the above means specifying defaults, or sum of requirements for the single European market in cultural registries. These "EU-Locales" can neither be the responsibility of individual European National Standard bodies nor that of ISO.

An important by-product of this main objective is the establishment of a network of those responsible in each CEN member country for cultural technical specifications and to help feed their requirements into International official and de-facto standards. This is important, as the main weakness of the ISO work is that very few National Standard bodies are active in it. The work is often highly technical and it is often not obvious how linguistic or cultural requirements relate to it. This network and associated awareness of the problems at hand is also needed to encourage European National Standard Bodies to work on their own National specifications that in many cases do not exist.

It is believed that a single point of contact for European "locale" specification is desirable. For National Bodies it is believed that a CEN committee focusing on cultural needs will enable them to forward their specifications into a great number of technical committees without direct and costly participation for themselves but also saving costs for the committees in question with administrating participation of all interested national bodies.

CEN/TC304 must avoid work on standards that are better taken care of by ISO or at a national level rather than European. Only in exceptional cases where no International standardisation exists, should CEN/TC304 work on European standards on internationalisation. Standards in newly emerging technologies such as in human language technology may be candidates for such work.

CEN/TC304 must also avoid work on standards that are worked on by such established standards making bodies as IETF and W3C unless this is done in liaison with them.

Strategies adopted to reach the Objectives

This business plan proposes that CEN/TC304 consolidates and simplifies its operation.

Work in CEN/TC304 will need to focus on the requirements of the users and CEN/TC304 must therefore be a representative forum of the requirements of all its members. CEN/TC304 will attempt to have contacts and participation from all CEN members and all affiliated members who show interest. Participation is sought by responsible authoritative bodies who can claim they represent their countries. This will set CEN/TC304 aside from the numerous technical committees in localization that must conduct their work using only a small number of technical experts.

The structure of CEN/TC304 shall continue to be flat with no sub-committee and no working groups. Expert groups or project teams have been set up by the CEN/TC but only on a single project basis with a short life span.

Only in exceptional cases shall documents be distributed on paper. All CEN/TC304 documents shall be retrievable from the Internet by its members. Living documents that are maintained by the CEN/TC304 secretariat with content approved by the CEN/TC304 shall be accessible to the world.

CEN/TC304 shall allow and encourage direct participation by delegates from pan European institutions and global IT vendors with observer status. Approval of such participation shall be sought from CEN/TC304 members and CEN/BT. CEN/TC304 shall not however have any forum where it is unclear which entity each delegate is representing.

CEN/TC304 can only be a representative forum for localization requirements of the European single market, if national standardisation bodies are willing and able to participate in the work. In the past, countries in Southern Europe (Spain, Italy, and Portugal) have not been participating. Making participation easier and more attractive to these countries, by better serving their understandable needs is a high priority task.

CEN/TC304 has at times been accused of being occupied with exotic requirements of marginal commercial interest of nearly extinct or historical languages in Europe or of neighbouring regions. Even if such work must not be ignored the CEN/TC304 will risk losing interest of major vendors and National Standardisation bodies if too much attention is given to marginal requirements with little foreseeable market for localization.

CEN/TC304 is competing for attention of the National Standardisation bodies, with many different forums both in formal and industrial standardisation. No other forum however tries to offer European National Bodies one point of contact for all their localisation requirements. For this to be more than empty words, the contact network of CEN/TC304 must be strengthened by increased liaison activity with other technical committees for mutual benefit of both parties. What CEN/TC304 can offer will be a reasonable good coverage of CEN Europe for example for comments on specifications developed by other technical committees.

The lack of infrastructure in many CEN countries for participation in "linguistic" standardisation has meant that voluntary work on standards both in CEN and ISO has not been easily forthcoming. CEN/TC304 has received funding from the EC and EFTA for much of its work-program. There is a risk involved when applying such funding that work is undertaken that at a later stage proves not to lead to desirable results, neither commercially, nor for protection of cultural diversity This may not become apparent until after the work has been started. Corrective measures must be taken for deletion of such work, even if funding is available for continuation.

This section gives an overview of existing and planned standardisation projects, called Work Items (WI). The aim of this listing is to demonstrate the adequacy of the proposed programme of work with the actual market or stakeholders’ needs.

You will find that all projects have been grouped into three groups. One group is for producing living documents containing national localisation information, also in this group are initial studies, later to lead to formal standard work. These projects do not have a Work Item number as their deliverables are not formal CEN deliverables. Another group is for producing CEN reports giving situation reports on cultural items. The third are ENVs for specifying pan-European defaults and sum of requirement in "locales". All current production of deliverables is in small Project Teams under direct CEN/TC304 control. A few of these PT have established CEN/ISSS WS to complete their specifications in form of CEN Workshop Agreements.

CEN/TC 304 - Information and communications technologies - European localization requirements

ENVs,

European Pre-standards with defaults and sum of requirements applicable in multilingual pan-European applications:

Under this heading come the following Work Items:

.

CEN reports,

with information on various aspects of localisation:

Under this heading come the following reports:

Maintenance:

Under this heading comes maintenance of existing standards of CEN/TC304.

Work Items proposed to be deleted and removed from this Work Program,

Studies,

Living documents published on the CEN/TC304 web site with information on localisation issues of CEN/TC304 members, entries for each member supplied and approved by the responsible standardisation body. Under this heading are also potential future Work Item.

1. National Locales (population of cultural registries)

Scope: To report and aid national bodies in registration of their national locales in ENV12005. A preliminary study to appear in year 2000, a final study in 2001.

2. Euro in Standardisation

Scope: To monitor and report on the inclusion of the Euro Sign in standards. A final and approved study was delivered in June 1999.

3. Matching

Scope: To analyse and report on standardisation aspects of searching and multilingual texts, to propose formal standardisation work if need is seen. Study to appear in October 1999.

4. TAP/LE (report on Language Engineering research projects ripe for standardisation)

Scope: To analyse and report on standardisation aspects of the Telematic Application Program in Language Engineering, to propose formal standardisation work if need is seen. Study to appear in year 2000.

5. Testing of the Euro Glyph for the OCR-B repertoire

ENVs (proposed) are listed first:

Reference : 00304020 Available : 2000-05 as ENV
European Ordering Rules - Ordering of characters from the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts
Document scope: Multilingual ordering of European characters, applicable in multilingual pan-European environment. Harmonising work of all bodies dealing with standardised multilingual ordering.
EC/EFTA Mandate : n/a EC Directive :n/a
Candidate Harmonized Standard : N Present Stage : 49
Document : CEN/TC 304 N 203 Track : Enquiry&Vote
Working Document (Stage 32) :realised 1993-10
Public Enquiry (Stage 40) : realised 1999-08
Formal Vote (Stage 49) : realised 1999-08
Proposed Action(s) :
Comments : This work is being conducted in a Project Team EOR. CEN initiated final voting on prENV13710 1^st of September 1999.

Reference : 00304030 Available : 2001-02 as EN
European Fallback Rules - Fallbacks for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts
Document scope : Multilingual fallbacks of European characters, applicable in multilingual pan-European environment. Harmonising work of all bodies dealing with standardised fallbacks.
EC/EFTA Mandate : n/a EC Directive :n/a
Candidate Harmonized Standard : N Present Stage : 32
Document : CEN/TC 304 N 476 Track : Enquiry&Vote
Working Document (Stage 32) :realised 1995-09
Public Enquiry (Stage 40) : forecasted 1999-10
Formal Vote (Stage 49) : forecasted 2000-05
Proposed Action(s) : ENV instead of EN
Comments : Change of deliverable from EN to ENV. This Work Item was originally to be a part of a group of ENs in Character repertoire and coding transformations (see work item 10), but by a TC-resolution the work on Character repertoire and coding transformation (WI 10) is now proposed as a CEN report. The WI 30 is now proposed as an ENV because the Fallback Rules are now meant as an "EU locale" entry like the Ordering rules

Reference : 00304031 Available : 2001-02 as ENV
European Ordering Rules - Ordering of characters from the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Georgian and Armenian scripts
Document scope : Multilingual ordering of European characters, applicable in multilingual pan-European environment. Harmonising work of all bodies dealing with standardised multilingual ordering.
EC/EFTA Mandate : n/a EC Directive :n/a
Candidate Harmonized Standard : N Present Stage : 11
Document : Track : Enquiry&Vote
Working Document (Stage 32) :forecasted 1997-10 (outdated)
Public Enquiry (Stage 40) : forecasted 2000-05
Formal Vote (Stage 49) : forecasted 2000-05
Proposed Action(s) :
Comments :

Reference : 00304050 Available : 2000-07 as ENV
European default locale
Document scope : Minimum entries of European Locale definitions, applicable only in multilingual pan-European environment.
EC/EFTA Mandate : n/a EC Directive :n/a
Candidate Harmonized Standard : N Present Stage : 11
Document : Track : Enquiry&Vote
Working Document (Stage 32) :forecasted 1999-10
Public Enquiry (Stage 40) : forecasted 1999-10
Formal Vote (Stage 49) : forecasted 1999-10
Proposed Action(s) : Correct locate to locale in the CEN data base
Comments

Reference: 0030405??

Comments :

M-12 Resolution 2 - A new OCR-B Work Item

The approval of this new WI is sought here in this proposed BP.

CEN Reports (proposed) are listed second:

M-14 Resolution 9 CEN/TC304 Tübingen April 1999 Transformation Model - Deliverable
CEN/TC304 resolves to request CEN Central Secretariat to delete the Work Item 46 for the EN on a "General Model for Graphic Character Transformations" and to create a new work item for a CEN Report with the same title. It instructs its secretariat to make a corresponding change in the streamlining proposal for TC304 before it is issued for TC enquiry. The secretary is to implement this resolution before the next meeting of CEN/TC304 by proposing this in a streamlined business plan or by drawing up a delegated resolution for CEN/BT approval.

Comments : The text for the scope is taken out of the final draft already sent to CEN/TC304 members for approval.

Reference : 00304041 Available : 2000-07 as CR
European keyboards - Guidelines and overview
Document scope : European application guidelines on keyboard standards.
EC/EFTA Mandate : n/a EC Directive :n/a
Candidate Harmonized Standard : N Present Stage : 11
Document : ISO/IEC 9995 Track : Enquiry&Vote
Working Document (Stage 32) :forecasted 1999-10
Public Enquiry (Stage 40) : forecasted 1999-10
Formal Vote (Stage 49) : forecasted 1999-10
Proposed Action(s) :
Comments :

Reference : 00304043 Available : 2000-07 as CR
A European Project on the Information Infrastructure: European Culturally Specific requirements
Document scope : To provide a framework of requirements for use in the definition of middleware specifications. Develop a description of middleware service properties to be used in a European environment. Identify in addition to the requirements, a programme of work needed to realise those requirements where they might usefully be subject to standardisation, e.g. API specifications.
EC/EFTA Mandate : n/a EC Directive :n/a
Candidate Harmonized Standard : N Present Stage : 11
Document : Track : Enquiry&Vote
Working Document (Stage 32) :forecasted 1999-10
Public Enquiry (Stage 40) : forecasted 1999-10
Formal Vote (Stage 49) : forecasted 1999-10
Proposed Action(s) :
Comments :

Maintainance:

Comments :

M-14 CEN/TC304 Tübingen April 1999 Resolution 11 EN1923

Work Items proposed for deletion

Since TC304 has no plan for creating a CEN report when and if CWA is produced in WS Alpha, we propose here that this WI be removed from the BP.

Reference : 00304045 Available : 1996-01 as ENV
Procedures for European registration of cultural elements
Document scope : No scope provided.
EC/EFTA Mandate : n/a EC Directive :n/a
Candidate Harmonized Standard : N Present Stage : 11
Document : ENV 12005:1996 rev Track : Enquiry&Vote
Working Document (Stage 32) :forecasted 1994-02 (outdated)
Public Enquiry (Stage 40) : forecasted 1995-04 (outdated)
Formal Vote (Stage 49) : forecasted 1995-04 (outdated - update and add 9 months to give availability above)
Proposed Action(s) : Delete from Work Program

Reference : 00304046 Available : 1999-07 as EN (?)
Character repertoire and coding transformations - Transformation method ISO 2022-TM
Document scope : No scope provided.
EC/EFTA Mandate : n/a EC Directive :n/a
Candidate Harmonized Standard : N Present Stage : 11
Document : Track : Enquiry&Vote
Working Document (Stage 32) :forecasted 1996-09 (outdated)
Public Enquiry (Stage 40) : forecasted 1997-10 (outdated)
Formal Vote (Stage 49) : forecasted 1998-10 (outdated - update and add 9 months to give availability above)
Proposed Action(s) : Delete WI.

Comments :

M-13 Resolution 8 Revision of ENV1973:

This section gives a list of European Publications that have been published by the CEN/TC and the information whether or not their references have been published in the Official Journal of the European Communities.

Comments : Wasn't EN 1922 supposed to replace ENV 41504 and ENV 41503:1990/AC:1991??

Chairperson : Mr W. Arfvidson
Secretary : Mr Þ. Sigurðsson
CEN Member responsible : STRI

Chairman's commitment to this CEN/TC for the next three years: days/year
Secretary's commitment to this CEN/TC for the next three years : days/year
Translation workload is planned for per individual work item : Y/N
Additional human resources that the CEN/TC would like to participate in their work, e.g.specific expertise :
Proposed Action(s) : Approval of extended term of Chair

Editing Committee

Convenor :
Secretary :
Convenor's commitment to this CEN/TC for the next three years : days/year
Secretary's commitment to this CEN/TC for the next three years : days/year
Professional standardisation support is available : Y/N
English language expert available : Y/N
French language expert available : Y/N
German language expert available : Y/N
Additional human resources that the Editing Committee would like to participate in their work, e.g. specific expertise :