The ICANN meeting in New Delhi today will focus on the Indian experience with the Internationalised domain names and potential lessons for the implementations of IDNs. This will be the main point of interest of the workshop at ICANNs public meeting today.

"ICANN's IDN program is about making close to 100,000 characters from the languages of the world available at the top level – the part after the dot -- so users can benefit from a domain name in fully localised language or script," said Tina Dam, ICANN's IDN Program Director. " India has 22 official languages and has done a great deal of foundation work on how languages and scripts – or the collection of characters used in a language – can be categorized and used. There are a lot of lessons for the world coming out of the work being done in India."

Different languages can share many similar characters and scripts. There are numerous technical issues as well as policy issues on how they might be handled and used in domains. A lot of work has been done on these issues in India. The IDNs in Indian Languages and Scripts workshop will cover the following topics:

• An Introduction To Indian Languages, and Scripts

• Development of Language Tables, Policy Issues for Indic Scripts

• Indian Languages in Computer Applications

• Status of Indian Language Deployment in Operating Systems

• Status of Indian Language Deployments in Computer Applications