Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Also available in print.

This thesis examines the historical array of 'social' and 'technical' factors that have shaped the development and evolution of Korean national Coded Character Set (CCS) standards. CCS standards refer to a layer of compatibility standards which specify rules for digital representation of textual data at the most basic level of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The effective and efficient operation of information processing, storage, and exchange is thus dependent on the employment of technically sound, economically viable, and culturally adequate CCS standards at national, regional and international levels. Historicaily, the CCS standards had emerged around the cultural presumptions and practices of the US and Western Europe due to the economic and tcchnical dominance of the region from the formative stage of ICTs development. As the need for global information infrastructure and multilingual information processing has been growing, however, the international CCS standards regime has evolved (from 1SO 646, to ISO 2022, and JSO/IEC 10646-1) to incorporate various national scripts around the world, and the issues have arisen over the adequate representation of these scripts within the international standards regime. For example, the incorporation of East Asian scripts, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, presents a formidable challenge with their exceptionally large repertoire. In particular, the design and implementation of Korean national CCS standards, normally a exclusive domain of experts and bureaucrats, had caused a series of heated public controversies during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the intensity of disputes and the breadth of participation in the controversies on Korean national CCS standards, the standardisation process had not been subject to a detailed socio-economic analysis, the lack of which allowed deterministic and simplistic speculations to appear, implying technological rationality, economic imperatives or corporate strategics alone have guided the CCS standards along a linear development path with increasingly larger and more powerful standards replacing previous ones. Drawing on the social shaping of technology perspective, the case study examines the evolution of Korean national CCS standards, focusing both on the process in which a standards emerges as a result of network building activities and alliance formation of various actors, and on the changes in immediate and broader contexts around the standardisation which directly and indirectly affect the interests alliances and evolution of standards. Contrary to the deterministic and simplistic perspectives, the case study suggests a structured but also dynamic social shaping process of the Korean national CCS standards. Four major themes forwarded in the case study are as below: First, the case identified a received view on the Korean controversy which can be characterised as 'technological fix on cultural problem' in a sense that technical challenge experienced in Korean character encoding was a product of distinctive local culture and the problem was fixed by the steady advances in the information technology. Without denying the importance of the state of technological capabilities, however, the case shows that social choices had been made both in international and national standards and had critical roles in shaping various controversy and whole national standards sdting process. Second, the case study identifies two contrasting modes of standardisation, 'technicisation' and 'politicisation,' and examines how the fluctuation between them has affected the development of Korean national standards setting process. In the discourse of technicised standardisation, technological knowledge is accepted as neutral, asocial 'hard fact.' Accordingly, the social choices are obscured and the standardisation process is to be dominated by the negotiation among disinterested experts over the relative technical merits of standards. Under the politicised mode of standardisation,' the political nature of CCS standards design - conflicting values and incongruent ascription of technological properties as a result - is brought forward. The standardisation is characterised by the formation of and competition among interests alliances. The outcome of standardislltion seems to be dependent on which mode is dominant as well as who prevails in each mode. Third, the case study raises a question about the relationship between the standards and interests embedded in them. The ascription of certain technological properties to standards and the interests alliances built around them proved unstable and dynamic. Both of them seem to be influenced by network building activities of llctors and their backdrop, a specific configuration of economic, social, cultural, political and technological factors, enabling and constraining the activities of actors involved in the standardisation process. As the makeup of the configuration changes for various reasons, - for example, globalised software market, social movements, surge of nationalism, political democratisation, advances in related technological field - the meanings attached by the actors to the standard also shifts, and the interests alliances based on them are unmade and replaced by new ones, producing a series of character set standards. Fourth, the study also draws attention to the complexity involved in the nlltional standardisation process and the challenge faced by the social research into those intricate social shaping process. The standardisation process involved many actors at different levels and across various geographical locales. Also there had been recurrent but unpredictable changes in the relationship among the actors and between the actors and artefacts. A recent trend in the social shaping approach - a call for a decentralised concept of actor and the transforming terrain of innovation - was found hrlpful to meet the challenge. In particular, the concept of 'development arena' was found useful to meet the challenge and to understand the case in balance between the actions of different 'modes of performance' and the contexts of varying 'configurations' of heterogeneous clements.

published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

Thesis (M.A.)--Guo li Taiwan gong ye ji shu xue yuan, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-98).

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 75-79).

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-98). Also available in print.

by Lo I Fan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references. / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Introduction / Chapter 1.1 --- The Evolution of Fonts --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Bitmap Fonts --- p.2 / Chapter 1.3 --- Outline Fonts / Chapter 1.3.1 --- Arc and Vector Form --- p.4 / Chapter 1.3.2 --- Spline Form --- p.4 / Chapter 1.3.3 --- Pros and Cons of Outline Fonts --- p.8 / Chapter 1.4 --- Examples of Outline Fonts / Chapter 1.4.1 --- Adobe's PostScript --- p.9 / Chapter 1.4.2 --- Apple's and Microsoft TrueType / Chapter 1.4.2.1 --- Outline Representation --- p.10 / Chapter 1.4.2.2 --- Rasterisation --- p.12 / Chapter 1.4.2.3 --- Hinting --- p.13 / Chapter 1.5 --- Bold Fonts / Chapter 1.5.1 --- Definition of Bold --- p.15 / Chapter 1.5.2 --- Definition of Auto B oldness --- p.16 / Chapter 1.5.3 --- Auto Boldness by Double Printing --- p.17 / Chapter 1.5.4 --- Auto Boldness by Multi-Master Technique --- p.18 / Chapter 1.6 --- Chinese Fonts / Chapter 1.6.1 --- Chinese Character Sets --- p.19 / Chapter 1.6.2 --- The Subtleties of Chinese Fonts Auto Boldness --- p.21 / Chapter 1.7 --- Project Objective --- p.23 / Chapter 1.8 --- Goals --- p.23 / Chapter Chapter 2: --- Main Ideas of Chinese Font Auto Boldness / Chapter 2.1 --- Prototype of Auto Boldness Driver --- p.24 / Chapter 2.2 --- Design Features of the Prototype Auto Boldness Driver --- p.25 / Chapter 2.3 --- Data Structure and Algorithm of Auto Boldness / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Data Structure of TrueType Character Outline --- p.27 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Algorithm of Auto Boldness --- p.28 / Chapter 2.3.3 --- Algorithm Description --- p.29 / Chapter 2.4 --- Component Font Auto Boldness --- p.35 / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Language of Auto Boldness / Chapter 3.1 --- Enhancements of TrueType Engine to support Auto Boldness --- p.36 / Chapter 3.2 --- Symmetric Bold Instruction --- p.38 / Chapter 3.3 --- Rotate Bold Instruction --- p.47 / Chapter 3.4 --- Asymmetric B old Instruction --- p.50 / Chapter 3.5 --- Comparison of Bold Instructions --- p.54 / Chapter 3.6 --- Serif Accommodation Instruction --- p.55 / Chapter Chapter 4: --- Shape Parsing and Auto Bold Code Generation / Chapter 4.1 --- Compilation Process and Auto Boldness --- p.62 / Chapter 4.2 --- Shape Lexical Analyzer --- p.64 / Chapter 4.3 --- Shape Token Attributes Evaluation / Chapter 4.3.1 --- line Token --- p.66 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- bezier2 Token --- p.67 / Chapter 4.3.3 --- sharp Token --- p.70 / Chapter 4.3.4 --- concave Token --- p.75 / Chapter 4.3.5 --- convex Token --- p.75 / Chapter 4.4 --- Scope of Shape Parsing --- p.76 / Chapter 4.5 --- Shape Parsing Mechanism --- p.77 / Chapter 4.6 --- Model Grammar Rules / Chapter 4.6.1 --- Grammar Rule Format --- p.81 / Chapter 4.6.2 --- Grammar Rule Item --- p.82 / Chapter 4.6.3 --- Grammar Rule Assignment --- p.83 / Chapter 4.6.4 --- Grammar Rule Condition --- p.83 / Chapter 4.7 --- Auto Boldness Code Generation --- p.84 / Chapter 4.8 --- Program Methodology of Prototype Auto Boldness Driver --- p.86 / Chapter Chapter 5: --- Conclusions / Chapter 5.1 --- Work Achieved --- p.87 / Chapter 5.2 --- The Pros and Cons of Auto Boldness Algorithm --- p.88 / Chapter 5.3 --- Bold Quality Assessments --- p.91 / Chapter 5.3 --- Future Directions --- p.93 / References / Appendix One / Appendix Two

by Wong Tsz Kin. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-47). / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Characteristics of Chinese Character --- p.2 / Chapter 1.1.1 --- The Nature of Chinese Language --- p.2 / Chapter 1.1.2 --- The Structure of Chinese Characters --- p.3 / Chapter 1.1.3 --- Basic Writing Strokes --- p.3 / Chapter 1.1.4 --- Writing Stroke Sequencing --- p.3 / Chapter 1.1.5 --- Geographic Structure of Components --- p.4 / Chapter 1.2 --- Stroke Distribution of Chinese Characters --- p.5 / Chapter 1.3 --- Radical --- p.5 / Chapter 1.4 --- Overview --- p.6 / Chapter 1.5 --- Objective --- p.10 / Chapter 2 --- Preprocessing --- p.12 / Chapter 2.1 --- Smoothing and Sampling --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2 --- Interpolation --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3 --- Dehooking --- p.13 / Chapter 2.4 --- Normalization --- p.14 / Chapter 2.5 --- Stroke Segmentation --- p.15 / Chapter 3 --- Preclassification --- p.18 / Chapter 3.1 --- Feature Analysis --- p.18 / Chapter 3.2 --- Radical Detection --- p.20 / Chapter 3.3 --- Description of The Preclassification Component --- p.22 / Chapter 3.4 --- Results and Conclusions --- p.23 / Chapter 4 --- The Recognition Stage --- p.25 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.25 / Chapter 4.2 --- Stroke Match Algorithm --- p.26 / Chapter 4.3 --- Relation Match Stage --- p.30 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Introduction --- p.30 / Chapter 4.4 --- Final Classification --- p.35 / Chapter 5 --- Results and Conclusions --- p.39 / Chapter 5.1 --- Experiment Results --- p.39 / Chapter 5.2 --- Analysis --- p.39 / Chapter 5.3 --- Conclusions

Yeung Lap Kei. / Thesis (M.Sc.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [14-15]). / PREFACE / ABSTRACT / CONTENT / Chapter §1. --- INTRODUCTION / Chapter §1.1 --- The Chinese language --- p.1 / Chapter §1.2 --- Chinese information processing system --- p.2 / Chapter §1.3 --- Chinese character recognition --- p.4 / Chapter §1.4 --- Multi-stage tree classifier Vs Single-stage tree classifier in Chinese character recognition --- p.6 / Chapter §1.5 --- Decision Tree / Chapter §1.5.1 --- Basic Terminology of a decision tree --- p.7 / Chapter §1.5.2 --- Structure design of a decision tree --- p.10 / Chapter §1.6 --- Motivation of the project --- p.12 / Chapter §1.7 --- Objects of the project --- p.14 / Chapter §1.8 --- Development environment --- p.14 / Chapter §2. --- APPROACH 1 - UNSUPERVISED LEARNING --- p.15 / Chapter §3. --- APPROACH 2 - SUPERVISED LEARNING / Chapter §3.1 --- Idea --- p.17 / Chapter §3.2 --- The 3 Corner Code --- p.20 / Chapter §3.3 --- Feature Extraction & Selection --- p.22 / Chapter §3.4 --- Decision at Each Node / Chapter §3.4.1 --- Statistical Linear Discriminant Analysis --- p.22 / Chapter §3.4.2 --- Optimization of the Number of Misclassification --- p.24 / Chapter §3.5 --- Implementation / Chapter §3.5.1 --- Training Data --- p.36 / Chapter §3.5.2 --- Clustering with the Use of SAS --- p.38 / Chapter §3.5.3 --- Building the Decision Trees --- p.42 / Chapter §3.5.4 --- Description of the Classifier --- p.45 / Chapter §3.6 --- Experiments and Testing Result / Chapter §3.6.1 --- Performance Parameters being Measured --- p.47 / Chapter §3.6.2 --- Testing by Resubstitution Method --- p.50 / Chapter §3.6.3 --- Noise Model --- p.52 / Chapter §4. --- POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENT --- p.55 / Chapter §5. --- EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS & THE IMPROVED MULTISTAGE CLASSIFIER / Chapter §5.1 --- Experimental Results --- p.59 / Chapter §5.2 --- Conclusion --- p.70 / Chapter §6. --- IMPROVED MULTISTAGE TREE CLASSIFIER / Chapter §6.1 --- The Optimal Multistage Tree Classifier --- p.72 / Chapter §6.2 --- Performance Analysis --- p.73 / Chapter §7. --- FURTHER DISCRIMINATION BY CONTEXT CONSIDERATION / Chapter §7.1 --- Idea --- p.76 / Chapter §7.2 --- Description of Algorithm --- p.78 / Chapter §7.3 --- Performance Analysis --- p.81 / Chapter §8. --- CONCLUSION / Chapter §8.1 --- Advantage of the Classifier --- p.84 / Chapter §8.2 --- Limitation of the Classifier --- p.85 / Chapter §9. --- AREA OF FUTURE RESEARCH AND IMPROVEMENT / Chapter §9.1 --- Detailed Analysis at Each Terminal Node --- p.86 / Chapter §9.2 --- Improving the Noise Filtering Technique --- p.87 / Chapter §9.3 --- The Use of 4 Corner Code --- p.88 / Chapter §9.4 --- Increase in the Dimension of the Feature Space --- p.90 / Chapter §9.5 --- 1-Tree Protocol with Entropy Reduction --- p.91 / Chapter §9.6 --- The Use of Human Intelligence --- p.92 / APPENDICES / Chapter A.1 --- K-MEANS / Chapter A.2 --- Unsupervised Learning Approach / Chapter A.3 --- Other Algorithms (Maximum Distance & ISODATA) / Chapter A.4 --- Possible Improvement / Chapter A.5 --- Theories on Statistical Discriminant Analysis / Chapter A.6 --- Passage used in Testing the Performance of the Classifier with Context Consideration / Chapter A.7 --- A Partial List of Semantically Related Chinese Characters / Chapter A.8 --- An Example of Misclassification Table / Chapter A.9 --- "Listing of the Program ""CHDIS.C""" / REFERENCE