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Multilingual
Domain Names . A domain name or a web address is used to identify an entity within the Internet in a format that humans can easily understand. At the most basic level, it maps a human-readable address, such as www.nic.gov.jo to a machine-readable Internet Protocol (IP) address (193. 188.66.104). In its current form, only a limited set of ASCII characters, namely letters, digits and hyphens, can be used in domain names. However, the Internet has experienced dramatic growth in the past ten years. It took 74 years for the telephone network to reach 50 million users. It took only 4 years for the World Wide Web to reach that same number. Today, more than 350 million users are connected to the Internet. The diversity of users from different cultures and languages and societies not familiar with ASCII is growing daily ( cultures that are not familiar with the English language). To address this phenomenon, e-mail and web pages in many scripts and languages are supported by various pieces of Internet software. Yet domain names are still in ASCII characters and pose a significant linguistic barrier. Native speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Thai and others who use non-ASCII cannot access the Internet through the domain name by using non-ASCII characters (all domain names are registered in English).In an attempt to solve this problem, as well as generally provide for improved multilingual and multiscript support, a process of “internationalization” of the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) has been underway. Various test-beds that emerged in Singapore and Asia now have proved that there is a need to internationalize domain names and there is demand for non-ASCII characters to be used for domain names and addresses. International groups such as the IETF formed an IDN (International Domain Names) Working Group to work on technical solutions. However, multilingualization/ internationalization poses problems of administration and management and policy. In 2001, many groups emerged to administer and manage non-ASCII domain names such as AINC ( Arabic Internet Names Consortium ), MINC ( Asia), CDNC( China), a Tamil group and a Japanese one. At the same time, developments in administration & management and policy of domain names in ASCII-based domain names was going on.On the policy side, ICANN formally embarked upon its activities related to multilingual domain names in March 2001. It considered policy coordination to be vital for the introduction of multilingual domain names based on any technology standards. ICANN Board decided to set up a committee consisting of experts from various fields. This committee’s mission would be to provide recommendations on non-technical policy issues, including interoperability, cybersquatting/dispute resolution, top-level domains, consumer protection and competition.Other snags that need to be solved include : - New suggested standards that use keywords (in the URL) instead of domain names or a combination of DNS and keywords. - Intellectual rights issues have emerged. Originally, domain names were used to identify computers by user-friendly names. Now, domain names are considered equivalents to brand names, product names and service names. - Translation of domain names and transliteration poses another challenging issue for intellectual property rights. The NIC participated in the first Arab country code top level domains meeting that was hosted by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, in Cairo, Egypt, on Tuesday the 15th of January, 2002 at the Cairo International Conference Center, on the periphery of Cairo 2002 Telecomp. The meeting, organized by the Arabic Internet Names Consortium, was attended by representatives from twelve Arab countries, including Arab ccTLD managers, AINC executive council members, and representatives of Arab governments. Attendance also included representatives from ICANN, AFTLD and the Egyptian Society for Arabizing Science. Arab countries participating in the meeting included: Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia and United Arab Emirates. The three-session meeting was co-chaired by Dr. Gamal Mohamed Aly, .EG ccTLD Manager and Director of the Egyptian Universities Network, Dr. Youssef Nusseir, . JO ccTLD Manager and President of the National Information Center, Jordan, and Eng. Christine Arida, AINC Chair. The status of the Internet and domain name registrations in the Arab countries were addressed by the Arab ccTLD Managers and country,representatives.The country presentations were followed by a number of specialized presentations on linguistic and policy issues related to the Arabic Internet domain name process. The third set of presentations were given by international experts, who presented on the global work of ICANN related to domain names with special focus on ccTLD initiatives and the Internationalized domain name process. Presentations were followed by round table discussions, where a number of important issues were raised. - The Center participated in “Multilingual Domain Names: a joint ITU/WIPO symposium”, Geneva, 6-7 Dec., 23-12-2001. Day one was led by ITU and dealt with technology and policy issues, and day two was led by WIPO and dealt with intellectual property issues. The Symposium discussed multilingual domain names & web addresses and the use of scripts of other languages in non ASCII (Latin) characters in countries that do not use the Latin script in their written languages, like Arabic, Chinese, Tamil, Japanese and many others. Recently, there has been a need among these countries to internationalize the domain name system. The objective of the Symposium was to raise wider understanding of the problems of internationalizing domain names and offer opportunities for dialogue.The symposium concentrated on few implementation complex problems: · Technical issues. · Interoperability · Administration & management polices. · Competition & market access. · Intellectual property & dispute resolutions. · Culture and social issues inherent in languages.
- The National Information Centre participated in the
Cairo 2002 Telecomp Forum that was held in Cairo from 14-17 January, 2002. The
President of NIC delivered a paper on Jordanian initiative and aspirations in
information technology including the e-government initiative, the e-learning
project of the Ministry of Education and various government efforts to
introduce Information Technology in the daily functions of the public
enterprises and to remote areas. Princess Mired bin Raad bin Zeid Visits the Centre On 18th Nov.,2001, his Royal Highness, Prince Mired bin Raad bin Zeid paid a visit to the National Information Centre, where he met with the President of the Centre. He was briefed about the activities of the centre, action plans and future plans. The aim of the visit was to discuss possibilities of cooperation with the Centre to build an electronic database of expatriate experts. Expatriates included in the database would be considered electronic ambassadors for Jordan and they will be contacted for consultation on socio-economic issues at the national level. Brand names of the new technology for internationalization of Domain Names
NativeNames
i-DNS
Real Names VeriSign Global Registry Services (VGRS)VGRS is currently offering an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) test bed that presently provides registration and resolution services for multilingual domain names using a client-side solution. In the VGRS test bed, only the second level domain is internationalized; the native language domain is followed by the ICANN authorized TLD .com, .net or .org to form a mixed language domain name. VGRS accepts more than 39 Unicode scripts for IDNs. The VGRS IDN test bed uses ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE) as currently proposed by the IETF IDN Working Group to encode IDNs into ASCII strings. RealNames keyword technology is employed, making it possible for Microsoft Internet Explorer users to access websites with URLs containing multilingual domain names. |