An efficient, programmable and interchangeable code system: EPICS

This paper proposes and evaluates a character or symbol code system called EPICS for multilingual information processing. EPICS integrates a variable- length coding system using 16-bit units and a smart virtual machine. EPICS enhances the interchangeability of data. The variable-length coding system provides a huge code space. This huge space can include not only standardiz ed code sets but also non-standardized codes of ancient symbols and user-sp ecific symbols. The smart virtual machine executes inputs as instructions a nd is dynamically customizable. It allows us to define and modify instructi ons during runtime and provides us with customization facilities. Customiza tion facilities can be used to specify a sorting order and normalization. C ustomization also makes it possible for an information producer (sender) to express his intentions or annotations in data and for an information consu mer (receiver) to process the data depending on his needs. Moreover, custom ization enables one to send compressed data and decompression program fragm ents incrementally and efficiently without predefined decompression algorit hms.