Character Data Representation Architecture

IBM has an established system to uniquely and uniformly identify and name graphic characters. This system provides for character identification using one of the following graphic character identifiers:

• Graphic Character Global Identifier (GCGID).
  The GCGID identifies graphic characters defined by IBM. The GCGID definition uniformly associates an arbitrary graphic character shape with an eight-character identifier GCGID.
• Graphic Character UCS Identifier (GCUID).
  The GCUID format is used for defining additional characters and sets of characters that (mostly) exist in the Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) defined in ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode standards and need to be used in IBM resource definitions such as IBM code pages. The format allows all current and future characters from UCS planes 0 through 17 to be described. It also allows for identifying characters and glyphs that are not defined in UCS as well as glyph variants of the unified Han area of UCS.

The on-line GCGID Registry contains the actual GCGIDs, GCUIDs, character glyphs and character names.