UNICODE at the Council of Europe EUUG Conference, Dublin, 7th - 9th September 2005 (E.Sodomova)

UNICODE at the Council of Europe

EUUG Conference, Dublin, 7th - 9th September 2005

(E.Sodomova)

Contents

• Who we are? (46 member states, Structure, Library and Archive)

• Our web catalogue• Multilingual solutions we have tried (Samples)• What is Unicode• Current status in Unicorn• Project for implementing Unicode• What was required ?• Where we are ?

Who we are?

http://www.coe.int

AimsThe Council was set up to:• defend human rights, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, • develop continent-wide agreements to standardise member countries' social and legal practices, • promote awareness of a European identity based on shared values and cutting across different cultures.

46 member states    Albania (13.07.1995); Andorra (10.11.1994); Armenia (25.01.2001)Austria (16.04.1956);

Azerbaijan  (25.01.2001); Belgium (05.05.1949Bosnia & Herzegovina (24.04.2002);Bulgaria (07.05.1992)Croatia (06.11.1996); Cyprus (24.05.1961);

Czech Republic (30.06.1993)Denmark (05.05.1949); Estonia (14.05.1993); Finland (05.05.1989)France (05.05.1949); Georgia (27.04.1999); Germany (13.07.1950)Greece (09.08.1949); Hungary (06.11.1990); Iceland (07.03.1950)Ireland (05.05.1949); Italy (05.05.1949);Latvia

(10.02.1995)Liechtenstein (23.11.1978)Lithuania (14.05.1993); Luxembourg (05.05.1949)Malta (29.04.1965);

Moldova (13.07.1995)Monaco (05.10.2004)Netherlands (05.05.1949); Norway (05.05.1949); Poland (26.11.1991)Portugal (22.09.1976); Romania (07.10.1993)Russian Federation

(28.02.1996); San Marino (16.11.1988)Serbia and Montenegro (03.04.2003)Slovakia (30.06.1993); Slovenia (14.05.1993); Spain

(24.11.1977)Sweden (05.05.1949); Switzerland (06.05.1963)”The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” (09.11.1995)Turkey (09.08.1949); Ukraine

(09.11.1995)United Kingdom (05.05.1949)

Structure• The Committee of Ministers is the Council of Europe’s decision-making body. It comprises

the foreign ministers of all member states, or their permanent diplomatic representatives in Strasbourg. It is both a governmental body, where national approaches to European problems are discussed on an equal footing, and a forum to find collective responses, to these challenges. In collaboration with the Parliamentary Assembly, it is the guardian of the Council’s fundamental values, and monitors member states’ compliance with their undertakings.

• Parliamentary Assembly: The deliberative body of the Council of Europe, composed of 315 representatives (and the same number of substitutes) appointed by the 46 member states’ national parliaments.

• European Court of Human Rights :Based in Strasbourg, this is the only truly judicial organ established by the European Convention on Human Rights. It is composed of composed of one Judge for each State party to the Convention and ensures, in the last instance, that contracting states observe their obligations under the Convention. Since November 1998, the Court has operated on a full-time basis.

• In 1994, the Council of Europe established the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe (CLRAE) as a consultative body to replace the former Standing Conference of Local and Regional Authorities. The Congress helps new member states with practical aspects of their progress towards establishing effective local and regional self-government.

Library and Archive

• Giuseppe Vedovato library – created 1951• Archives since 1949• Holdings – 9km of shelving• System in use Unicorn + Hyperion• Daily production 100-200 titles• Need to serve users from 46 countries which represent• Official languages:English, French• Working languages:+German, Italian, Russian• Need for multilingual solutions

• http://www.coe.int/t/e/com/library_archives/

Our web catalogue

• Multilingual search in Unicorn data (via bilingual authorities applied in records)

• Reference nos for document • Different languages in use in fulltext

archive (Hyperion)• Search in Hyperion (fulltext, metadata or

via Unicorn Ilink)

• http://lms.coe.int/uhtbin/webcat

Multilingual solutions we have tried

• Automatic indexing/abstracting in different languages

• Multilingual search• Thesaurus• Our metadata come from various countries• Problem that always comes first – coding

of characters (samples) and method of inputing by staff in different countries

• UNICODE and UNICORN

Samples

•Sirsi solution for diacritics before Unicode – conversion script

What is Unicode

• Unicode (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)• UnicodeEncodings (UTF-7 ,UTF-8, CESU-8, UTF-16/UCS-2 ,UTF-32/UCS-4 ,

UTF-EBCDIC ,…) • Unicode provides an international standard which has the goal of providing the means

to encode the text of every document people want to store on computers. This includes all scripts in active use today, many scripts known only by scholars, and symbols which do not strictly represent scripts, like mathematical, linguistic and APL symbols.

• Establishing Unicode involves an ambitious project to replace existing character sets, many of them limited in size and problematic in multilingual environments. Despite technical problems and limitations, Unicode has become the most complete character set and one of the largest, and seems set to serve as the dominant encoding scheme in the internationalization of software and in multilingual environments. Many recent standards such as XML, as well as system software such as operating systems, have adopted Unicode as an underlying scheme to represent text.

Current status - Unicorn

We hope for having converted our data in FALL 2005

Project for implementing Unicode

• Dates back to 2000

• Technical problems of Unicode

• Finally we have agreed the implementation plan with SIRSI in December 2004

• Expected : September 2005

What was required ?

• Unicorn version 2005 due for beta testing early in 2005 ( required a faster system, SUN Solaris 9 and ORACLE 9)

• Purchase of new server, migration of system and data• Upgrade of the old server - becomes the test server• beta test upgrade applied to the test server (March 2005)• database converted to Unicode• Betatesting: When beta testing is complete the proper

release of Unicode 2005 can be re-applied to the test server, converted to Unicode. Then finally the live server can be upgraded and converted.

Where we are ?

• database conversion to Unicode expected in September

• Why delayed– Problems with beta versions– Internal reorganisation– Coordination problems when working in distance (e.g.

java WF version in use)– Java WF betatesting

• Advise: work as closely as possible with your consultant (you save time of all team members): communicate – communicate - communicate

QUESTIONS