Category: Announcements

For twenty-five years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. The 40th conference will be held this year on November 1-3, 2016 in Santa Clara, California.

The deadline for speaker submissions is Monday, 4 April, so don’t forget to send in an abstract if you want to speak at the conference.

The Program Committee will notify authors by Friday, May 13, 2016. Final presentation materials will be required from selected presenters by Friday, July 22, 2016.

Tutorial Presenters receive complimentary conference registration, and two nights lodging, while Session Presenters receive a fifty percent conference discount and two nights lodging.

FREME is a project that is developing a Framework for multilingual and semantic enrichment of digital content. A key aspect of the framework is that it puts standards and best practices in the area of linguistic linked data and multilingual content processing in action. We will introduce the framework in a dedicated webinar on 22 February, 4 p.m. CET. If you are interested in participating please contact Nieves Sande and Felix Sasaki for further logistics.

This video explains what Linguistic Linked Data is and summarizes the outcomes of the LIDER project. This includes best practices for working with Linguist Linked Data, a reference architecture and a roadmap for future activities around Linguistic Linked Data. The video has been produced by the LIDER project and has been published during the European Data Forum 2015 event.

In the last two years, the LIDER project has organized several roadmapping events to gather a broad community around the topic of linguistic linked data. On October 20th 2015 LIDER will engage with two selected communities: linguistics and experts in digital humanities, via a national roadmapping workshop that will take place in Spain. The 7th LIDER roadmapping workshop will focus on these topics and will be held in Madrid at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The participation will be free and open. Spanish will be the main language of the event. For more information also about participation please visit the workshop website http://lider-project.eu/workshopMadrid/

In the last two years, the LIDER project has organized several roadmapping events to gather a broad community around the topic of linguistic linked data. In October this year, LIDER will engage with two selected communities: linguistics and experts in digital humanities, via a national roadmapping workshop that will take place in Spain. The 7th LIDER roadmapping workshop will focus on these topics and will be held in Madrid at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The participation will be free and open. Spanish will be the main language of the event. For more information also about participation please visit the workshop website http://lider-project.eu/workshopMadrid/

A report summarizing the MultilingualWeb workshop in Riga is now available from the MultilingualWeb site. It contains a summary of each session with links to presentation slides and minutes taken during the workshop in Riga. The workshop was a huge success. With the parallel Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) event, it had more than 200 registered participants. See a summary of highlights, and a dedicated report about outreach activities of the supporting EU funded LIDER project. The Workshop was locally organized by Tilde, sponsored by the LIDER project and by Verisign. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.

For both workshops participation is limited. If you are interested in the Rome event please contact Tiziano Flati, for Munich please contact Philipp Cimiano.

Version 8.0 of the Unicode Standard is now available. It includes 41 new emoji characters (including five modifiers for diversity), 5,771 new ideographs for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the new Georgian lari currency symbol, and 86 lowercase Cherokee syllables. It also adds letters to existing scripts to support Arwi (the Tamil language written in the Arabic script), the Ik language in Uganda, Kulango in the Côte d’Ivoire, and other languages of Africa. In total, this version adds 7,716 new characters and six new scripts. For full details on Version 8.0, see Unicode 8.0.

The first version of Unicode Technical Report #51, Unicode Emoji is being released at the same time. That document describes the new emoji characters. It provides design guidelines and data for improving emoji interoperability across platforms, gives background information about emoji symbols, and describes how they are selected for inclusion in the Unicode Standard. The data is used to support emoji characters in implementations, specifying which symbols are commonly displayed as emoji, how the new skin-tone modifiers work, and how composite emoji can be formed with joiners. The Unicode website now supplies charts of emoji characters, showing vendor variations and providing other useful information.

Some of the changes in Version 8.0 and associated Unicode technical standards may require modifications in implementations. For more information, see Unicode 8.0 Migration and the migration sections of UTS #10, UTS #39, and UTS #46.

In the context of the Big Data Value Association Madrid Summit, 17-19th June, there are two sessions of specific relevance to standards and also to multilingualism: on 18th June a session on standardization, and on 19th June a session on Multilingual Data Value Chains. If you want to have an active participation in both sessions or want to provide further feedback, please contact Felix Sasaki <fsasaki@w3.org> on Standardization and Asun Gomez-Perez <asun@fi.upm.es> on Multilingual Data Value Chains. Presentation will be short in order to promote a wide participation.

If you cannot be in Madrid please also provide your input – see above session links for further instructions. The BDVA Summit will be crucial in shaping upcoming funding opportunities related to Big Data. Don’t miss the chance to describe your views on opportunities, challenges and potential solutions for the Big Data Value Chain!

The LIDER project is fostering the creation of a community around Linguistic Linked Data (LLD): linked data used to represent metadata about linguistic resources and the resources themselves, e.g. lexica, thesauri, corpora, multilingual semantic networks etc. In a dedicated LD4LT community group call on 2 April, 3 p.m. CEST, we will discuss how LLD can contribute to the creation of the digital single market. See for more details the slides that will be presented during the call.