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Generation Panel

The Procedure to Develop and Maintain the Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone in Respect of Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) Labels (the Procedure) defines a two-pass process for creation of the IDN Label Generation Rules (LGR) for the Root Zone as follows: "The first pass creates a set of label generation rules specific to a given script, writing system, language, or all of these; this task is carried out by Rule Generation Panels composed of people with deep experience or interest in the script, writing system or language used by some community of Internet users." [Procedure to Develop and Maintain the Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone in Respect of IDNA Labels] [PDF, 772 KB]

The second pass is to review the proposal by the Generation Panels by the Integration Panel, which comprises of experts in the fields of Linguistics, Unicode, Domain Name System and the IDNs.

Status of Generation Panels

Label Generation Rules (LGR) Generation Panel Status

For further details about generation panels visit Generation Panel Community Wiki Page. To learn more about why Generation Panel and IDN work is important to the community and a multilingual Internet, view our Generation Panel leader quote page here.

To establish Generation Panels for scripts that meet the criteria set out in the Procedure and Requisite Expression of Interest without an established working group, ICANN must start the process by appointing a chair. ICANN will work with that chair on the task to attract volunteers that have an interest and appropriate expertise to do the work, as well as the qualifications to be able to represent their community.

A hosting organization that can facilitate the work with meeting space and other resources, such as e-mail lists, conference call hosting, etc., in the interim is also helpful when establishing Generation Panels.

In all cases, the final decision whether a proposed Generation Panel meets the requirements set forth in the Procedure and whether to move forward to formally establish a particular panel rests with ICANN.

Speak up for your language. Please email IDNProgram@icann.org to contribute to the relevant Generation Panel.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."