The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization that coordinates the development of the Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 standard. Its stated goal is to eventually replace existing character encoding schemes with Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, claiming that many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope, and are incompatible with multilingual

Multilingualism

Multilingualism is the act of using, or promoting the use of, multiple languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of...

 environments. Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread use in the internationalization and localization

Internationalization and localization

In computing, internationalization and localization are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional differences and technical requirements of a target market...

 of computer software

Computer software

Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....

. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

, the Java programming language

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

, and modern operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

s.

The organization was founded to develop, extend, and promote the use of the Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 Standard. It cooperates with many standards development organizations

Standards organization

A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization , or standards setting organization is any organization whose primary activities are developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpreting, or otherwise producing technical standards that are...

, including ISO/IEC JTC1, W3C, IETF, and ECMA

ECMA

Ecma or ECMA may refer to:* Ecma International, an international standards organization for Information Communication Technology and Consumer Electronics* Engineering College Magazines Associated, a group of student-run engineering-based publications...

.

See also

• Comparison of Unicode encodings
  Comparison of Unicode encodings
  This article compares Unicode encodings. Two situations are considered: 8-bit-clean environments and environments that forbid use of byte values that have the high bit set. Originally such prohibitions were to allow for links that used only seven data bits, but they remain in the standards and so...
  
  
• Free software Unicode fonts
• Mapping of Unicode characters
  Mapping of Unicode characters
  Unicode’s Universal Character Set has a potential capacity to support over 1 million characters. Each UCS character is mapped to a code point which is an integer between 0 and 1,114,111 used to represent each character within the internal logic of text processing software .As of Unicode 5.2.0,...
  
  
• Universal Character Set
  Universal Character Set
  The Universal Character Set , defined by the International Standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal multiple-octet coded character set , is a standard set of characters upon which many character encodings are based...