ITK/Policy and Procedures for Internationalization

Background

In software, internationalization, or i18n, deals with the adaptation of software to various languages and customs used throughout the world. Since ITK is used world-wide for biomedical imaging, segmentation and registration, it is important that itk applications produce consistent results regardless of the regional differences.

Wikipedia describes four areas to consider for i18n software engineering: Language, Culture, Writing Conventions and Regulatory Compliance. Language issues and writing conventions have the biggest impact in itk.

Language Issues

Computer encoded text is an important i18n issue since it affects the internal representation of strings. Since itk has no user interface components, the primary i18n impact is on filenames.

Writing Conventions

Writing conventions affect date/time formats, time zones and how numbers are formatted. Number format is critical to itk applications since many file formats contain numbers in their headers. These number represent critical image information such as origin, spacing and direction. If they are improperly decoded or encoded, incorrect image information may be produced. For example, it the spacing of an image is stored as 1.7, a change in the locale of an application could interpret 1.7 as 1.0, since many regions of the world use "," as a separator rather than ".".