There are over 70,000 ideographs encoded in ISO/IEC 10646:2003 and its Amendment 1. The formulation of a subset of these ideographs can provide conveniences for day-to-day electronic communication in Chinese on resource-limited devices, for example mobile devices. In addition, this subset can also facilitate global electronic communications in Chinese by providing a shared subset of ideographs.
Ideographic Research Group (IRG), a working group for the development of ideographic characters in the ISO/IEC 10646 international coding standard, has formulated the IICORE. The IICORE contains 9,810 characters and it can be implemented in devices with limited memory, input/output capability, and/or applications where the use of complete ISO/IEC 10646 ideographs repertoire is not feasible.
This IICORE has been published by ISO in the ISO/IEC 10646:2003 Amendment 1 in November 2005. The information related to the development of the IICORE is available for reference at https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/IICore/IICore.htm.