As a practice, information system developers have generally designed and developed
systems to meet the requirements of a specific geographic or linguistic market segment,
which may be a nation or a particular cultural market. To make that information system
viable, or marketable, to a different segment of the market, a full re-engineering process
was usually required. Users or organizations that needed to operate in a multinational or
multicultural environment typically did so with multiple, generally incompatible
information processing systems.
International operation provides a set of services and interfaces that allow a user to
define, select, and change between different culturally related application environments
supported by the particular implementation. In general these services should be provided
in such a way that internationalization issues are transparent to the application logic.
- Character sets and data representation services include the capability to input,
store, manipulate, retrieve, communicate, and present data independently of the coding
scheme used. This includes the capability to maintain and access a central character-set
repository of all coded character sets used throughout the platform. Character sets will
be uniquely identified so that the end user or application can select the coded character
set to be used. This system-independent representation supports the transfer (or sharing)
of the values and syntax, but not the semantics, of data records between communicating
systems. The specifications are independent of the internal record and field
representations of the communicating systems. Also included is the capability to recognize
the coded character set of data entities and subsequently to input, communicate, and
present that data.
- Cultural convention services provide the capability to store and access rules and
conventions for cultural entities maintained in a cultural convention repository called a
locale. Locales should be available to all applications. Locales typically include date
and currency formats, collation sequences and number formats. Standardized locale formats
and APIs allow software entities to use locale information developed by others.
- Local language support services provide the capability to support more than one
language concurrently on a system. Messages, menus, forms, and on-line documentation can
be displayed in the language selected by the user. Input from keyboards that have been
modified locally to support the local character sets can be correctly interpreted.
The proper working of international operation services
depends on all the software entities involved having the capability to:
- use locales
- switch between locales as required
- maintain multiple active locales
- access suitable fonts
This requires software entities to be written to a particular style and to be designed
from the outset with internationalization in mind.
Copyright © The Open Group, 1998