ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2
Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) - ISO/IEC 10646

ROADMAPS
(a snapshot as of 2005-09-23)
(http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/roadmaps.html)


The intention of the roadmaps document is to show a visual layout of the coding space for further allocations of scripts in ISO/IEC 10646 (also in the Unicode Standard). These roadmap layouts are snapshots of scripts and characters that are known as of 2005-09-23 (after WG2 meeting no. 47, Sophia Antipolis, France, 2005-09-12/15). This document is intended to be used as general guideline and does not attempt to make detailed allocations of characters.

Table 1 outlines the different planes of ISO/IEC 10646 and their generic contents.

Table 1: Allocations for Planes in ISO 10646
Range of Code Positions (Hex)Plane # Name of Plane
00000000 ... 0000FFFFPlane 0 Basic Multilingual Plane - BMP; envisioned for encoding all contemporary scripts and symbols including most frequently used ideographs.
00010000 ... 0001FFFFPlane 1 Supplementary Multilingual Plane for scripts and symbols - SMP; envisioned for encoding future non-Ideographic and non-Unified Ideographic scripts and symbols.
00020000 ... 0002FFFFPlane 2 Supplementary Ideographic Plane - SIP; envisioned as containing future Unified Ideographic characters.
00030000 ... 0003FFFFPlane 3 Reserved for Future Allocation; should Plane 2, the SIP (Supplementary Ideographic Plane) prove insufficient for future Han character encoding, it is anticipated that further allocations may be provided on Plane 3.
00040000 ... 0004FFFF to
000D0000 ... 000DFFFF
Plane 4 to
Plane 13
Reserved for Future Allocations.
000E0000 ... 000EFFFFPlane 14 Supplementary Special-purpose Plane - SSP; envisioned for encoding special characters such as alphabet used for language tagging.
000F0000 ... 000FFFFFPlane 15Reserved for Private Use.
00100000 ... 0010FFFFPlane 16Reserved for Private Use.

The roadmap layouts are maintained by an adhoc group on Roadmaps. This group's latest working document is located at Roadmaps to Unicode. Snapshots from these layouts are submitted for WG2 acceptance for the continued work on ISO/IEC 10646 and is closely coordinated with the work on the Unicode Standard in liaison with the Unicode Consortium.

The latest snapshot of the roadmaps that reflects the resolutions from WG2 meeting M47 held 2005-09-12/15, for the BMP, SMP, SIP and SSP can be found at:

http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n2986.pdf. (also n2986.htm )

Please note that this roadmap consolidates into a single document information for each of the planes 0, 1, 2 and 14.

The above roadmaps indicate that these three planes should suffice for all future encoding of characters having world-wide utility. In addition,

Note that additional 10 supplementary planes are available for encoding (with an additional 2 planes reserved for private use).

The layouts show the different scripts in various stages of progression - published, accepted but not yet published, under evaluation in UTC and WG2, exploratory having some preliminary documentation, or open with no proposal documents.