Glyph Database of the Han Character

Project Representative(s): C.C. Hsieh
Dr. Hsieh is one of the world's leading experts on the matter of digitizing Han characters. As long-time head of the Chinese text input project at Academia Sinica, he has been forced to deal with in depth with the matter of incompatible encodings and missing characters, and in the course of this work, has developed an extensive database of Han (CJK) characters. He is presently working, in conjunction with Dr. Tetsuya Katsumura of Kyoto university, on a large project aimed at the development of a system of pan-East Asian encodement, which would, while being compatible with Unicode, offer a systematic method for the inclusion of new characters, based on clearly defined principles derived from the etymological history of the characters. Dr. Hsieh introduced his project, including the development of his glyph database. Solutions to the problem of incompatible CJK codes and missing characters have also long been the focus of the work of Urs App and Christian Wittern, for which they offered a provisional solution in their ZenBase CD.