The ISO 10646 Standard

ISO/IEC 10646 specifies the Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) for representation of all major languages in the world (including both traditional and simplified Chinese characters) as well as additional symbols.

ISO 10646 is an international coding standard being developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which is applicable to the representation, transmission, interchange, processing, storage, input and presentation of the written form of world languages (scripts) in electronic basis.

The first version of ISO 10646 standard is called ISO/IEC 10646 Part One released in 1993(ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993) which contains 20,902 ideograph characters. A newer version of Part One was released in October 2000(ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000) with an additional 6,582 ideographic characters, which are referred to as Extension A characters. Part 2 of ISO 10646(ISO/IEC 10646-2:2001), was published in 2001 with an additional 42,711 ideograph characters, which are referred to as Extension B characters.