Mark Edward Davis (born September 13, 1952) is an American specialist in the internationalization and localization of software and the co-founder and president of the

Unicode Consortium The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intentio ...

. He is one of the key technical contributors to the Unicode specifications, being the primary author or co-author of

bidirectional text A bidirectional text contains two text directionalities, right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR). It generally involves text containing different types of alphabets, but may also refer to boustrophedon, which is changing text direction in ea ...

algorithms (used worldwide to display Arabic language and Hebrew language text),

collation Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. Many systems of collation are based on numerical order or alphabetical order, or extensions and combinations thereof. Collation is a fundamental element of most office fil ...

(used by sorting algorithms and

search algorithm In computer science, a search algorithm is an algorithm designed to solve a search problem. Search algorithms work to retrieve information stored within particular data structure, or calculated in the search space of a problem domain, with eith ...

s),

Unicode normalization Unicode equivalence is the specification by the Unicode character encoding standard that some sequences of code points represent essentially the same character. This feature was introduced in the standard to allow compatibility with preexisting ...

Unicode scripts Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, whic ...

text segmentation Text segmentation is the process of dividing written text into meaningful units, such as words, sentences, or topics. The term applies both to mental processes used by humans when reading text, and to artificial processes implemented in comput ...

identifier An identifier is a name that identifies (that is, labels the identity of) either a unique object or a unique ''class'' of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, physical countable object (or class thereof), or physical noncountable ...

s, regular expressions, data compression,

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values that ...

and

security Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social ...

Education

Davis was educated at Stanford University where he was awarded a PhD in Philosophy in 1979.

Career and research

Davis has specialized in Internationalization and localization of software for many years. After his PhD, he worked in Zurich, Switzerland for several years, then returned to California to join Apple, where he co-authored the Macintosh

KanjiTalk KanjiTalk was the name given by Apple to its Japanese language localization of the classic Mac OS. It consisted of translated applications, a set of Japanese fonts, and a Japanese input method called Kotoeri. The software was sold and supported ...

and Script Manager, and authored the Macintosh Arabic and Hebrew systems. He also worked on parts of the

Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...

, including contributions to the design of

TrueType TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...

. Later, he was the manager and architect for the Taligent international frameworks and was then the architect for a large part of the Java international libraries. At IBM, he was the Chief Software Globalization Architect. He is the author of a number of patents, primarily in internationalization and localization. At various times he has also managed groups or departments covering text, internationalization, operating system services, porting and technical communications. Davis founded and was responsible for the overall architecture of International Components for Unicode (ICU: a major Unicode software internationalization library) and designed the core of the Java internationalization classes. He also is the vice-chair of the Unicode

Common Locale Data Repository The Common Locale Data Repository Project, often abbreviated as CLDR, is a project of the Unicode Consortium to provide locale data in XML format for use in computer applications. CLDR contains locale-specific information that an operating sys ...

(CLDR) project, and is a co-author of

Best Current Practice A Best Current Practice (BCP) is a ''de facto'' level of performance in engineering and information technology. It is more flexible than a standard, since techniques and tools are continually evolving. The Internet Engineering Task Force publishe ...

(BCP) 47

IETF language tag An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code or tag that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the su ...

Request for Comments (RFC 4646 and RFC 5646), used for identifying languages in

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

and HTML documents. Since the start of 2006, Davis has been working on software internationalization at Google, focusing on effective and secure use of Unicode (especially in the index and search pipeline), overall improvement and adoption of the software internationalization libraries (including ICU) and the introduction and maintenance of stable identifiers for languages, scripts, regions, time zones and currencies.

Publications

''The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0''

Personal life

Davis is married to Anne Gundelfinger. He has two daughters from a previous marriage.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Davis, Mark 1952 births American computer programmers Apple Inc. employees Google employees Living people People involved with Unicode