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Connecting Japanese IT with the World

Creating an IT-based Society Connecting Everyone

If each enterprise proceeded to develop their own information technologies, each of the systems would, one day, probably be no longer able to connect to each other. From its fair and neutral stance as a public institution, IPA conducts the necessary surveys and releases information to maintain a fi xed link between software.

■Towards Fairer IT System Procurement

 The information system procurement by government needs to be fair and neutral. On its competitive bidding, the requirements must state neutral specifications, avoiding the product names and unique functions.
 IPA has prepared and published a technical reference model (TRM). TRM gathers the technical information necessary for procurement, and supports the fair procurement of information systems in accordance with government policy.
 TRM contains the information for creating neutral specifications.
- Typical system configuration models
- Examples of functional requirements non-specific to certain product names
- Non-functional requirements
We are promoting these in close collaboration with European and U.S.-affiliated institutions.

■Ruby - the Japanese-developed Programming Language

 Ruby is a programming language uniquely invented and developed in Japan which is rapidly gaining attention as original "made in Japan". This outstanding programming language Ruby allows programmers to succinctly write sophisticated programs and is used world wide. IPA supports promotion of Ruby through the release of Ruby training materials, which combine learning materials and a practice environment.

■IPA Fonts

 For computers to handle characters, the shape of the characters must be digitized and organized in fonts. IPA develops and releases high-definition IPA Font, which can be used on any system for free.
 The font can be used on any type of system or computer, because they are encoded in accordance with the international standard for character encoding, ISO/IEC 10646.
 IPA Font has 11,000 characters defined by the JIS (Japanese Industry Standard). However, Japanese Kanji* characters for people's names has tens of thousands of variants (see examples).
 Local governments need to support the names of their residents by creating each variant character and handling it as original data on their systems.
 The fact that some fonts could not handle all the variants made it difficult for interoperability between governmental systems.
 For this reason, IPA developed and released IPAmj Mincho Font - which supports approximately 60,000 characters. With this font, an e-Government which is more convenient to the public is possible.
* Kanji: Japanese ideographic characters which share the same origin as China and Korea

Figure 1. New Font Development (IPAmj Mincho)

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