The Unicode Consortium (Unicode Inc.) 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 (UTF) schemes, claiming that many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope, and are incompatible with multilingual environments. Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread use in the internationalization and localization of software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including XML, the Java programming language, and modern operating systems.
The organization was founded to develop, extend, and promote the use of the Unicode Standard. It was started in January 1991 in California .It cooperates with many standards development organizations, including ISO/IEC JTC1, W3C, IETF, and ECMA.
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