This paper describes a new markup vocabulary called “Internationalization Tag Set” (ITS). ITS provides elements and attributes for the internationalization and localization of XML documents and schemas. ITS is formulated in a schema language independent manner and implemented in XML DTD, W3C XML Schema and RELAX NG. It can be integrated into new or existing vocabularies of a great variety, like DITA, DocBook, HTML or TEI. The paper provides a general introduction to ITS and is organized as follows:

First, we will explain background information about ITS, including the motivation for creating ITS and potential users and usage scenarios.

The next section describes “basic concepts of ITS”. This encompasses the notion of “data categories” for internationalization and localization purposes, and the “selection” of nodes in XML documents to which they are related to. The data categories can be applied “globally” or “locally” in XML documents. They can be used for “adding” ITS information to nodes, or for “pointing” into documents to existing, ITS related information.

The section “overview of ITS data categories” describes roughly the purpose of all categories which are defined in the current ITS working draft.

Finally, the section “ITS specification development using ODD” describes how the ODD language has been applied for the creation of the ITS working draft, and the automatic generation of ITS markup declarations in the formats XML DTD, XML Schema and RELAX NG.