Common Locale Data Repository

From HandWiki
Short description: Computing project for a user locale data format
Common Locale Data Repository
Developed byUnicode Consortium
Initial releaseCLDR 1.0
(19 December 2003; 20 years ago (2003-12-19)[1])
Container forXML[2]
Websitecldr.unicode.org

The Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) is a project of the Unicode Consortium to provide locale data in XML format for use in computer applications. CLDR contains locale-specific information that an operating system will typically provide to applications. CLDR is written in the Locale Data Markup Language (LDML).

Details

Among the types of data that CLDR includes are the following:

  • Translations for language names
  • Translations for territory and country names
  • Translations for currency names, including singular/plural modifications
  • Translations for weekday, month, era, period of day, in full and abbreviated forms
  • Translations for time zones and example cities (or similar) for time zones
  • Translations for calendar fields
  • Patterns for formatting/parsing dates or times of day
  • Exemplar sets of characters used for writing the language
  • Patterns for formatting/parsing numbers
  • Rules for language-adapted collation
  • Rules for spelling out numbers as words
  • Rules for formatting numbers in traditional numeral systems (such as Roman and Armenian numerals)
  • Rules for transliteration between scripts, much of it based on BGN/PCGN romanization

The information is currently used in International Components for Unicode, Apple's macOS, LibreOffice, MediaWiki, and IBM's AIX, among other applications and operating systems.

CLDR overlaps somewhat with ISO/IEC 15897 (POSIX locales). POSIX locale information can be derived from CLDR by using some of CLDR's conversion tools.

CLDR is maintained by a technical committee which includes employees from IBM, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and some government-based organizations. The committee is chaired by John Emmons, of IBM; Mark Davis, of Google, is vice-chair.[3]

The CLDR covers 400+ languages.[4]

References

  1. CLDR Releases/Downloads
  2. Updating DTDs, CLDR makes special use of XML because of the way it is structured. In particular, the XML is designed so that you can read in a CLDR XML file and interpret it as an unordered list of <path,value> pairs, called a CLDRFile internally. These path/value pairs can be added to or deleted, and then the CLDRFile can be written back out to disk, resulting in a valid XML file. That is a very powerful mechanism, and also allows for the CLDR inheritance model.
  3. "Unicode CLDR - CLDR Process". http://cldr.unicode.org/index/process#TOC-Officers. 
  4. "Locale Coverage". https://unicode-org.github.io/cldr-staging/charts/41/supplemental/locale_coverage.html. 

External links