Hong Kong Adopts Internationally Recognised E-Business Infrastructure

by Mary Swire, Tax-news.com, Hong Kong

27 April 2001

The Hong Kong government's Acting Director of Information Technology Services, Mr Cheng Yan-chee, has announced that the government has adopted a framework based on international standards which will strengthen its e-business infrastructure.

Speaking at a conference on international character encoding standards this week, Mr Cheng explained: 'Under the "Digital 21" Information Technology (IT) Strategy, we have put in place the essential infrastructure built on open and common standards to facilitate the development of e-commerce in the local community and with the outside world.'

He added: 'One of the initiatives under the strategy is to provide an open and common Chinese language interface in Hong Kong for facilitating electronic communication conducted in Chinese.' This was facilitated by an international coding standard that embraces characters used in all major languages in the world, including ideographic characters in traditional and simplified Chinese.

In the immediate future the government intends to develop the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) and submit it to the International Organization for Standardisation (ISO) for incorporation into the ISO 10646 standard. Mr Cheng confirmed: 'Under the aegis of the ISO, we are actively participating in the on-going development of the ISO 10646 standard.'

Last year Hong Kong enacted the Electronic Transactions Ordinance which paved the way for its drive to implement the new infrastructure including the creation of a public certification authority and a local public key infrastructure (PKI). Mr Cheng said: 'The interoperability of our PKI, including digital certificates and the integrity of electronic records, with our international business counterparts is an area that will benefit from standardisation in coding and use.'

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