Glossary for Geospatial Science

Unicode:  A character encoding scheme that is a super set of ASCII and Latin-1 with room for 65,536 characters (a 16-bit or 2-byte set).  The Unicode standard is still in committee; it is in the care of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Unicode, Inc. (formerly the Unicode Consortium).  Unicode itself is a subset of ISO 10646, and in terms of ISO 10646, Unicode is the “Basic Multilingual Plane.”  Unicode is designed to include all characters needed for the written languages of the modern world.