Unicode Consortium

Unicode Consortium
Unicode, Inc.
FormationJanuary 3, 1991; 33 years ago (1991-01-03)
Founders
Founded atCalifornia, US
TypeNon-profit consortium
77-0269756[1]
Legal status501(c)(3)[1] California nonprofit benefit corporation
Purpose"To develop, extend and promote use of various standards, data, and open source software libraries which specify the representation of text in modern software[,] ... allowing data to be shared across multiple platforms, languages and countries without corruption"[2]
Location
Coordinates37°24′42″N 122°04′15″W / 37.411759°N 122.070958°W / 37.411759; -122.070958
Key people
  • Toral Cowieson (CEO)
  • Mark Davis (CTO & Cofounder; CLDR-TC Chair)
  • Anne Gundelfinger (Vice President and General Counsel)
  • Greg Welch (Vice President of Marketing)
  • Iris Orriss (Treasurer)
  • Ayman Aldahleh (Secretary)[3]
Revenue (2018)
$467,576[2]
Expenses (2018)$470,257[2]
Employees3[2] (in 2018)
Volunteers (2018)
10[2]
Websitehome.unicode.org Edit this at Wikidata

The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California, U.S.[4] Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intention of replacing existing character encoding schemes that are limited in size and scope, and are incompatible with multilingual environments.

The consortium describes its overall purpose as:

...enabl[ing] people around the world to use computers in any language, by providing freely-available specifications and data to form the foundation for software internationalization in all major operating systems, search engines, applications, and the World Wide Web. An essential part of this purpose is to standardize, maintain, educate and engage academic and scientific communities, and the general public about, make publicly available, promote, and disseminate to the public a standard character encoding that provides for an allocation for more than a million characters.[5]

Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread adoption in the internationalization and localization of software.[6] The standard has been implemented in many technologies, including XML, the Java programming language, Swift, and modern operating systems.[7]

Members are usually but not limited to computer software and hardware companies with an interest in text-processing standards,[8] including Adobe, Apple, the Bangladesh Computer Council, Emojipedia, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, the Omani Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs, Monotype Imaging, Netflix, Salesforce, SAP SE, Tamil Virtual Academy, and the University of California, Berkeley.[9][10][11] Technical decisions relating to the Unicode Standard are made by the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC).[12]

  1. ^ a b "Tax Exempt Organization Search". Internal Revenue Service. September 6, 2019. Archived from the original on August 9, 2020. Retrieved February 5, 2020.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Form 990: Return of Organization Exempt from Tax Archived February 5, 2020, at the Wayback Machine". Unicode, Inc. Internal Revenue Service. December 31, 2018.
  3. ^ "Unicode Executive Officers". Unicode Consortium. Retrieved February 2, 2023.
  4. ^ Wong, Queenie (February 12, 2016). "Q&A: Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium, on the rise of emojis". The Mercury News. Retrieved April 5, 2018.
  5. ^ "The Unicode Consortium Bylaws" (PDF). November 6, 2015. Retrieved December 6, 2019.
  6. ^ "How will you type the new Rupee symbol?". IBNLive. July 15, 2010. Archived from the original on July 18, 2010.
  7. ^ "Strings and Characters". The Swift Programming Language (Swift 4.1). Apple. Retrieved April 25, 2018.
  8. ^ Sugar, Rachel. "Tacos, dumplings, bagels: the complicated politics of food emoji". Vox. Retrieved October 27, 2018.
  9. ^ "The Unicode Consortium Members". Unicode, Inc. Retrieved October 23, 2021.
  10. ^ Unicode, Inc. (September 15, 2015). "Facebook Joins as Full Member of the Unicode Consortium". The Unicode Blog. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
  11. ^ Pelletiere, Nicole (October 25, 2018). "Emoji contenders for 2019 include mixed-race couples, a sloth and wheelchairs". ABC News. Retrieved October 27, 2018.
  12. ^ McGowan, R. (February 2004). "A Summary of Unicode Consortium Procedures, Policies, Stability, and Public Access". tools.ietf.org. doi:10.17487/RFC3718. Retrieved April 5, 2018.