The Common Locale Data Repository Project, often abbreviated as CLDR, is a project of the Unicode Consortium

Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization that coordinates the development of the Unicode standard. Its stated goal is to eventually replace existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format schemes, claiming that many of the existing...

 to provide locale

Locale

In computing, locale is a set of parameters that defines the user's language, country and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface...

 data in the XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 format for use in computer applications. CLDR contains locale specific information that an operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 will typically provide to applications. CLDR is written in LDML (Locale Data Markup Language). The information is currently used in International Components for Unicode

International Components for Unicode

International Components for Unicode is an open source project of mature C/C++ and Java libraries for Unicode support, software internationalization and software globalization. ICU is widely portable to many operating systems and environments. It gives applications the same results on all...

, Apple's Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

, OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software...

, and IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

's AIX, among other applications and operating systems.

Among the types of data that CLDR includes are the following:

• Translations for language names.
• Translations for territory and country names.
• Translations for currency names, including singular/plural modifications.
• Translations for weekday
  Weekday
  Weekday may either refer to only a day of the week which is part of the workweek thus not part of the weekend or to any of the days of the week.-Weekday as a day of the workweek:In most countries the days of the workweek are:# Monday# Tuesday# Wednesday...
  
  , month
  Month
  A month is a unit of time, used with calendars, which was first used and invented in Mesopotamia, as a natural period related to the motion of the Moon; month and Moon are cognates. The traditional concept arose with the cycle of moon phases; such months are synodic months and last approximately...
  
  , era
  Era
  An era is a commonly used word for long period of time. When used in science, for example geology, eras denote clearly defined periods of time of arbitrary but well defined length, such as for example the Mesozoic era from 252 Ma–66 Ma, delimited by a start event and an end event. When used in...
  
  , period of day, in full and abbreviated forms.
• Translations for timezones and example cities (or similar) for timezones.
• Translations for calendar fields.
• Patterns for formatting/parsing dates or times of day.
• Examplar sets of characters used for writing the language.
• Patterns for formatting/parsing numbers.
• Rules for language adapted collation
  Collation
  Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetization, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...
  
  .
• Rules for formatting numbers in traditional numeral systems (like Roman numerals, Armenian numerals, ...).
• Rules for spelling out numbers as words.
• Rules for transliteration
  Transliteration
  Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...
  
   between scripts. A lot of it is based on BGN/PCGN romanization
  BGN/PCGN romanization
  BGN/PCGN romanization refers to the systems for romanization and Roman-script spelling conventions adopted by the United States Board on Geographic Names and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use .The systems have been approved by the BGN and the PCGN for...
  
  .

It overlaps somewhat with ISO 15897

ISO 15897

ISO 15897 is an ISO standard for the registration of new POSIX locales and POSIX charmaps.Items registered in the registry are:*Narrative Cultural Specifications*POSIX Locales*POSIX Charmaps*Repertoiremaps...

 (POSIX locales). POSIX locale information can be derived from CLDR by using some of CLDR's conversion tools.

CLDR is maintained by the CLDR technical committee, which includes organizations from IBM, Apple, Sun Microsystems and some government based organizations. The committee is currently chaired by Mark Davis

Mark Davis (Unicode)

Dr. Mark E. Davis is a co-founder of Unicode, Inc registered in the State of California, U.S.A. on 4th January 1991, and has been leading the company since then as the president that started Unicode project....

 (Google) and Deborah Goldsmith (Apple).

External links

• Common Locale Data Repository, the informational webpage of the CLDR project
• Windows CLDR Tool Open source tool to import CLDR locales into Windows Vista.