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The Chief Executive, Mr Tung Chee Hwa, today (Tuesday) received on behalf of the Government an electronic version of Sikuquanshu donated by a local publishing company.

Sikuquanshu, a comprehensive collection of classical texts with some 800 million characters, provides an unparalleled source of information about Chinese culture and history spanning 5,000 years.

At a presentation ceremony, Mr Tung paid tribute to Mr Gabriel Yu, Chairman of the Digital Heritage Publishing Limited, for his pioneering spirit in undertaking the digitisation of Sikuquanshu in collaboration with leading institutions in the literary and technological fields in the Mainland of China.

"I hope that more Hong Kong IT enterprises will now be encouraged to break new grounds in the realm of IT. This is crucial to our efforts in developing Hong Kong into a leader in the information world of tomorrow," Mr Tung said.

Mr Tung noted that the digitisation of Sikuquanshu was the first large scale project in the world which adopted the international coding standard ISO 10646 for the creation of a database of Chinese contents. "The success of this project demonstrates that Hong Kong is becoming a force to be reckoned with in the IT field," Mr Tung added.

The Acting Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting, Mrs Rita Lau, was also present at the ceremony. She said the digitisation of Sikuquanshu by using the ISO 10646 standard as the underlying Chinese platform coincided with Government's initiative to promote the adoption of ISO 10646, which would embrace all ideographic characters and would thus resolve existing difficulties in electronic communications as a result of non-compatible coding systems.

"The project also demonstrates the feasibility of and business opportunities for digitising content on a large scale," she said.

Mrs Lau hoped that the valuable experience gained from the project in the development of a common Chinese language interface would be shared among the local IT industry to spur further developments in this area.

Also present at the presentation were Dr Victor Fung, Chairman of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, and Professor K C Li, Vice-Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The Chinese University Press is a co-publisher and distributor of the electronic version of Sikuquanshu.

Photo:The Chief Executive, Mr Tung Chee Hwa , receives an electronic version of Sikuquanshu donated by Chairman of the Digital Heritage Publishing Limited, Mr Gabriel Yu. Also present at the ceremony are (from left): Prof Stephen Luk of Chinese University of Hong Kong; Mrs Rita Lau, Acting Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting; Prof K C Li, Vice-chancellor of Chinese University of Hong Kong; Mr Francis Lee of the Digital Heritage Publishing Limited; and Dr Victor Fung, Chairman of Hong Kong Trade Development Council.

End/Tuesday, 15 June 1999

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