The Global Information Infrastructure (GII), and the Global Information Society (GIS), are key concepts becoming widespread all over the world (http://www.gii.org; http://www.ispo.cec.be). The Keywords have been promoted by USA, EU, and G7 countries. It is believed, despite the goals set by the original promoters, the current technological pitfalls, and the current social/cultural conditions, that GII/GIS would create free sharing of information, free access to digital information for all the people around the world, and thus creates the equal opportunity for accessing recorded knowledge in digital form over telecommunication link.

GII/GIS is to be configured by regional, national, wide-area, local-area networks, under a commonly used name, "Information Highway." However, observation is made by Torrijos (1996) that there are emerging trends that would require a dramatic shift in strategies in terms of developing the national information infrastructure (NII). This observation particularly addresses to the Asian scene:

2. COMPUTER APPLICATION SYSTEMS ON GII AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL INHERITANCE

For taking full advantage of GII promises, Sato set the conditions of computer application systems in the age of GII/GIS (Sato, 1996b). He saw two aspects of computer systems and networks:

• Types of systems

- Loosely coupled systems like E-mail, or WWW, and
- Tightly configured systems such as an integrated manufacturing control system.

The loosely coupled systems requires less machine dependency than the latter that operates on the designated system only.

• Scopes of computer systems

- worldwide international systems and

- local systems.

The combination of these two aspects form four groups of systems that make up the continuum of the current IT scene leading to GII/GIS. The combination of the four groups requires "Open System," "Interoperability," etc.

In terms of English language, developments towards the Open System or Interopeability are part of solution to provide full convenience to consumer in English language. Then, Sato pointed out a question of the equal solution to non-English speaking consumers. Most of the loosely coupled systems, advantages are shared regardless of English or non-English speaking consumer. But for tightly configured systems, the solution towards GII/GIS is not yet shared by non-English speaking consumer.

The cause this arises from is, by Sato's observation, the development of local language support that did not exist 10 years ago. The local or national language supports have been developed in regions, countries to catch domestic demands. Existing local solutions are based on:

Adaptation of a system to a user's cultural environment is called in many ways, such as "internationalization," "localization," or "customization." Uemura explored on the concepts of ISO/IEC TR 11017: 1997: (Uemura, 1997).

(1) Mono-culture/script/language;

(2) Mono-culture/script/language;

(3) Mono-culture/language; Multi-script;

(4) Mono-culture; Multi-script/language;

(5) Multi-culture/script/language

Uemura suggested two approaches -- "Global Uniformity Approach" and "Cross-Cultural Friendliness Approach." The Global Uniformity Approach is to choose one standard to minimize the information ambiguity due to the cultural dependent multiple solutions for the same item. The cross-cultural Friendliness Approach is to realize a system which supports maximization of user interface applicability (user friendliness) in multi-culture, multi-lingual environment. Based on these ISO/IEC TR concepts, Uemura defined the immediate issues including:

In 1987, AFSIT was organized mainly for those governmental agencies in Asian countries who have a large initiative on IT standardization. It has provided opportunities for promoting standardization technology exchange with experts in the Asian countries in the information field. The Secretariat of the AFSIT is in located in the Center of International Cooperation for Computerization (CICC)1 with the collaboration of the Information Technology Research and Standardization Center (INSTAC) of the Japanese Standards Association (JSA)2 under the auspices of Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) of JAPAN (MITI) for the purposes of information exchange on IT standardization and on preparation of international standards; as well as providing consulting services on IT standardizations.

Activities of the AFSIT are comprised of:

(http://www.cicc.or.jp/homepage/english/library/in_af.htm).

5. DATA BOOK OF ASIAN CULTURAL CONVENTION

It has been an urgent need for IT Internationalization to collect and cumulate the cultural convention. In Western languages, the cultural convention data has been cumulated substantially by international activities such as the International Standardization Organization (ISO) as well as by information industries and already applied in part to information products and services. However, the Asian Requirements to Internationalization, itself of a problematic concept and contents, has not been presented yet. There is a great need to do this since there are great market potential for information products and services in the Asian region.

In July 1992, a proposal was made by CICC to setting up a SIG (Special Interest Group) on internationalization (I18N) of IT within the framework of the AFSIT with the following purposes:

6. CULTURAL CONVENTIONS COLLECTED

26 items on Cultural conventions were identified and examined to form the core of the Data Book entries (Naito and Sato, 1996). These are:

7. MLIT

An international symposium has been organized by INSTAC/CICC since 1997. MLIT (International Symposium on the Standardization of Multi-lingual Information Technology) was first held in May in Singapore organized by INSTAC/JSA by the support of UNIDO, and the National Computer Board (NCB), Singapore. The second was held in November 1997 in Tokyo organized by CICC. Aims of MLIT is: harmonization of information processing technology and standards relating to languages and character of each countries to construct GII for all countries.

Experts were called upon from Brunei, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea R. O., Lao P. D. R., Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmer, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Discussions were focused on the main theme, "Multi-Lingual Information Technology". Because of the development of ISO/IEC 10646, Universal Character Code/Set, to which many countries in Asia are involved, our awareness of involvement have been emerged in many Asian countries. Certainly, multi-scripts encoding is one basic function of MLIT. However, national/domestic discussion(s) on the national character set are diffused by variety of reasons.

In MLIT-1, held in May 1997 in Singapore, common software such as word processing, or spread sheet, was demonstrated by the participating experts for various languages. Situation of national standardization were reported particularly concerning to PC diffusion, national IT standardization including the character set(s). These software were re-examined by the experts at the MLIT-2, held in November 1997 in Tokyo, to find out the standardization issues in-depth including the problem of common character sets. MLIT-3 is being planned to be held October 1998.

So far, MLIT has focused to form a general framework for Multi-Lingual IT standardization with experts from 14 Asian countries.
 
 

REFERENCES

Naito, Eisuke and Sato, Takayuki K. (1996a). Data Book of Cultural Convention in Asian Countries: In Pursuit of Common Data Container. Bangkok: SEARCC '96, July 4-7, 1996.

Sato, Takayuki K., ed. (1996a). Data Book of Cultural Convention in Asian Countries - Record of Activity of the AFSIT-SIG for IT Internationalization. Version 1.1. October 1996. Tokyo: CICC. 95 p.

Sato, Takayuki K. (1996b). "GII for equal opportunity," Keynote lecture presented at the Round Table Discussion of the 10th Asian Forum of Standardization for Information Technology (AFSIT-10), 29 October 1996, Cheju Island, Korea.

Torrijos, Delia E. (1996). "Address" In Report on the Experts' Donors' Meeting on the Development and Training of Information Professionals in Asia and the Pacific, 14-16 August 1996, Cuezon City, Philippines. pp. 25-27.

Uemura, Shunsuke. (1997). "Equal language opportunity in information technology," Keynote Lecture at the 1st International Symposium on the Standardization of Multilingual Information Technology (MLIT '97 [MLIT-1]), 26-28 May 1997, Singapore.