305
Chapter XVII
Unicode Characters for Human
Dentition:
New Foundation for Standardized Data
Exchange and Notation in Countries
Employing Double-Byte Character Sets
Hiroo Tamagawa
The Japan Association for Medical Informatics,
Japan
Masatoshi Hitaka
The Japan Association for Medical Informatics,
Japan
Hideaki Amano
The Japan Association for Medical Informatics,
Japan
Noriaki Morimoto
The Japan Association for Medical Informatics,
Japan
Naoji Hayashi
The Japan Association for Medical Informatics,
Japan
Hideaki Narusawa
The Japan Association for Medical Informatics,
Japan
Yasuyuki Hirose
The Japan Association for Medical Informatics,
Japan
Ichiro Suzuki
The Japan Association for Medical Informatics,
Japan
Abstract
In this chapter, the authors report the minimal set of characters from the Unicode Standard that is sufficient for the notation of human dentition in Zsigmondy-Palmer style. For domestic reasons, the Japanese
Ministry of International Trade and Industry expanded and revised the Japan Industrial Standard (JIS)
character code set in 2004 (JIS X 0213). More than 11,000 characters that seemed to be necessary for
Copyright © 2009, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Unicode Characters for Human Dentition
denoting and exchanging information about personal names and toponyms were added to this revision,
which also contained the characters needed for denoting human dentition (dental notation). The Unicode
Standard has been adopted for these characters as part of the double-byte character standard, which
enabled, mainly in eastern Asian countries, the retrieval of human dentition directly on paper or displays
of computers running Unicode-compliant OS. These countries have been using the Zsigmondy-Palmer
style of denoting dental records on paper forms for a long time. The authors describe the background
and the application of the characters for human dentition to the exchange, storage and reuse of the history of dental diseases via e-mail and other means of electronic communication.
Introduction
Computers store letters and other characters by
assigning a number to each character (Kilbourne
and Williams, 2003). The entire collection of
characters is called a character code set. The
character code set was established in Europe and
America, and was gradually expanded together
with the advent of computers. ASCII (American
Standard Code for Information Interchange)
(ANSI INCITS 4-1986, 1963) is one of the most
popular and representative character code sets,
and it is capable of encoding a maximum of 256
characters using one byte of information. All
alphanumeric characters are covered by this
code system, and ASCII has become the de facto
worldwide standard due to its simplicity.
Together with the development of computers, a
problematical point emerged in that the one-byte
character set does not have the capacity to encode
enough characters in countries such as Japan,
China, Korea and other Asian countries which
utilize ideographic writing systems (Hussein et al.
2004) . The majority of these countries employs
writing systems based on the so-called Chinese
characters and has their origins in long-standing
Asian culture. Other glyphs, symbols and icons
developed in the course of history of the individual
countries are also used.
In order to circumvent the limitations of the
ASCII character set, computer systems in these
countries use two bytes for representing each
306
character. Characters encoded using two-byte
codes are called double-byte characters (Oram
1991). In double-byte character sets, each character is represented by two bytes, which enables
the encoding of a maximum of 65536 (256x256)
characters.
The design of Unicode (http://www.unicode.
org/) is based on the simplicity and the consistency of ASCII; however, since it assigns between
one and four bytes to each character, it goes far
beyond the abilities of ASCII which is limited to
encoding the Latin alphabet and a number of other
characters, including those with diacritic marks
used in European languages. Before Unicode
was invented, there were hundreds of different
encoding systems for assigning these numbers as
single encoding could contain enough characters
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode). For example, the European Union alone requires several
different encodings to cover all its languages
and even for a single language like English, no
single encoding was adequate for covering all
the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols
in common use.
Unicode has the explicit aim of transcending
the limitations of traditional character encodings,
such as those defined by the ISO 8859 standard
(ISO/IEC 8859-11, 1999) , which are widely used
in various countries of the world but remain
largely incompatible with each other. In principle,
Unicode encodes the underlying characters,
graphemes and grapheme-like units rather than
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