Proposal of an Unrestricted Character Encoding for Japanese

Abstract

The vast majority of characters used in Japanese are Chinese characters, which involve tens of thousands different glyphs. Due to this huge number of glyphs, database creation for character representation on computer systems has been an ongoing issue for years, and it has been actually since the early days of digital computing. Several character encodings have been described to allow the representation of character information, some specifically targeting Chinese characters, such as Big-5 and Shift-JIS, and others remaining general, such as Unicode. Yet, no matter the approach followed, it is still impossible to manipulate a large part of these characters as they are simply not covered by the current encoding solutions. Chinese characters feature various properties and relations, thus making it possible to classify them in a database according to several attributes. In this paper, we formally describe for such a large character database a structure in the form of a character encoding, thus aiming at addressing the concrete issue of character computer representation. It shall be shown that the proposed structure addresses the restrictions, such as coherency and glyph number, suffered by existing works. Finally, a database corresponding to the presented character encoding is practically assembled and visualised, demonstrating the advanced code structure.