Ideographic Research Group

IRG is tasked with preparing and reviewing sets of CJK unified ideographs for eventual inclusion in both ISO/IEC 10646 and The Unicode Standard.

[1][2] The IRG is composed of representatives from national standards bodies from China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and other regions that have historically used Chinese characters, as well as experts from liaison organizations such as the SAT Daizōkyō Text Database Committee (SAT), Taipei Computer Association (TCA), and the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC).

The group holds two meetings every year lasting 4-5 days each, subsequently reporting its activities to its parent ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 (SC2/WG2) committee.

[7] IRG is responsible for reviewing proposals to add new CJK unified ideographs to the Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (ISO/IEC 10646), and equivalently the Unicode Standard, and submitting consolidated proposals for sets of unified ideographs to WG2, which are then processed for encoding in the respective standards by SC2 and the Unicode Technical Committee.

A total of 4,674 characters were submitted for Working Set 2024 in July 2024 by China, Republic of Korea, SAT, TCA, United Kingdom, UTC, and Vietnam:[4]