Thank you for your comprehensive answer.
Rick McGowan wrote:
> Personally, I think you're getting ahead of yourself. First, you
> should demonstrate that you have done research and produced results
> that at least some people find so useful and important that they
> are eager to implement the findings. Then, once you have done
> that, think about standardizing something, but only after you
> have a working model of the thing sufficient to demonstrate its
> general utility.
I am an independent researcher, researching at home, using the internet and
various software items on a laptop computer.
I am not able to produce a working model. I can mostly only produce thought
experiments, sometimes expressed as a simulation, like a story narrative. Maybe
I could produce a short animation movie.
> While I do not speak for the UTC in any way, observations of the
> committee over a period of some years have led me to conclude that
> they never encode something, call it "X", on pure speculation
> that some future research might result in "X" being useful for some
> purpose that has not even been demonstrated as a need, or clearly
> enough articulated to engender the committee's confidence in its
> potential utility.
Well, as I say, I am an independent researcher, researching at home.
May I just mention one thing though which might be regarded as significant.
A short time ago I was talking with someone who is a clinician and I asked
about whether there were issues trying to communicate with people through the
language barrier.
I was told that sometimes people bring a relative or friend to translate.
An example was given to me of sometimes needing to use mime to try to express
the meaning of "Have you vomited?".
I asked if the following would be helpful.
Use your computer to look down a menu for a preset sentence "Have you vomited?".
Select the sentence.
Behind the scenes a code is generated.
Throw the code to the mobile telephone of the patient.
On the screen of the patient's mobile telephone the sentence localized into his
or her language is displayed.
I said that there would be a standardized list of preset sentences, set out in
English as International Standards are produced in English and that the
National Standardization Body for each country would translate the list into
the language of its country and produce a list to convert the codes to the
local language.
There was amazement and enthusiasm for this possibility.
So there we are.
The supreme irony of all of this is that there has been much objection to my
invention in this mailing list over the years, with no good reason ever stated,
yet it would be the very existence of The Unicode Standard itself that would
allow the localized text to appear on the screen of the mobile telephone of the
patient!
If this invention had been made in the research laboratory of a large
information technology company maybe things would be very different.
William Overington
23 October 2015
