Page 31 - 2010 Object identifiers (OIDs) and their registration authorities

Part 5 – More recent developments

Part 5

More recent developments

13 Internationalization

A major development in the early 2000s was the
"internationalization" of the OID tree. Author's remarks:
There were four important recognitions: The non-European and/or not English-

a) that it was no longer necessary for machine- speaking nations have become
increasingly active and important in the
readable forms to be pure binary (bandwidth was international standards world. They bring
no longer critical);
demands for the use of the full range of
b) that there was a need for Unicode labels to be Unicode characters in names, in order to
able to express OIDs using any of the languages express names (of people, organizations
of the world (using Unicode characters), in both and objects) in their own languages.
human-readable and machine-readable forms; "Internationalization" of the OID tree

c) that a guaranteed unambiguous form for a name made a general provision for this.
on an arc was needed to support the above;

d) that uniqueness of a Unicode label on an arc was not essential, as the primary integers were
regarded as Unicode labels, and as multiple language labels were to be entertained (controversial,
but accepted!).

This was all implemented in the 2008 edition of the OID standards that added Unicode labels to an arc on an
equal basis with the primary integer values (also now called "integer-valued Unicode labels" in their
character form).

This was all quite a big extension, but in 2010 there has not yet been much use of it apart from provision in
the high-level arcs for the use of Unicode labels, and for the provision of long arcs from the root to nodes
beneath 0.2.

[b-OID repository] records the allocations of Unicode labels for the high-level arcs (and for long arcs).

14 Rules on Unicode labels

The rules on Unicode labels are pretty straightforward.
All languages can be represented (with Unicode Author's remarks:
encoding). There is no restriction on case for the initial
letter. All printable ASCII characters (but not SPACE) The simple rule is: If a name is allowed as
can be included. Roughly speaking, anything that is a display name in an e-mail header,
allowed as a display name in e-mails without spaces is provided it does not contain the SPACE
valid for a Unicode label, for example: JohnLarmouth, character, it is a valid Unicode label.
КремерАркадийСоломонович, 이준섭, 中國, 한국/한국,
РоссийскаяФедерация, 日本.

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