The purpose of this paper is to illustrate, using the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library's "Gazetteer of Tibet and the Himalayas", the utility of the increasingly popular technologies that have been created to provide a totally XML-based framework for gathering, storing, manipulating and delivering data. The Gazetteer of Tibet and the Himalayas is an online resource that provides ready access to place-based content via hierarchical geographic models, both text- and map-based, of the region. In contrast to earlier incarnations of this Gazetteer, which used mutually unintelligible formats that required significant human manipulation of data at every step, the THDL Gazetteer 3.0 allows the Editor or Contributors to input data utilizing web-based XForms that transform the data into XML and store it in an eXist database, where it is manipulated with the XQuery language, then delivered to end users via XSLT transformations that generate the XHTML Web page. Implementing these XML technologies for the Gazetteer is a key step towards unifying data acquisition, storage, manipulation and delivery techniques here at the THDL. This grand unification will provide many benefits to the THDL as an entity functioning at the University of Virginia as well as to contributors and collaborators around the world. Data management within the Tibetan and Himalayan Digitial Library is an extensive and complex task made more problematic by the data's many different modes of existence and the concomitant need for different tools to manage those modes. Compounding these complexities is the multitude of collaborators, whose scholarship needs to be supported by the THDL, yet whose contributions arrive in an almost alarmingly disparate variety of formats. By streamlining our production and data management systems with an XML-based framework, we are better able to serve the community that creates and uses the THDL's resources.

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While most people in the world have been enjoying computer technology and the Internet for decades, the Tibetan community still does not have an operating system that supports the Tibetan language. At the present, there are many word processors that do not communicate with each other, and there is no single computer system yet in the world that supports the international standard, Unicode for Tibetan. After nearly ten years of efforts by the Tibetan computing community, a suitable computing foundation for Tibetan language is only now becoming a reality as we enter a new era of Tibetan information technology. This paper, after a brief introduction to the current Tibetan computing situation, will address the new font technology, OpenType, which makes the implementation of Tibetan Unicode possible in major popular operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Macintosh OS, and Linux. Since Microsoft Windows is overwhelmingly the most popular computing environment among the Tibetan community in China, this paper will focus on introducing the new Microsoft Windows operating system, Windows Vista, which will support the Tibetan language and will be released at the end of 2006. The second part of this paper will focus on the challenges that will still need to be addressed even after the advent of Tibetan Unicode supported operating systems. Specifically, these are: (1) how to develop a better Tibetan OpenType font; (2) how to design a more efficient Tibetan keyboard based on Tibetan Unicode; (3) understanding what will be the major technology issues in developing software for Tibetan language. In addition to these topics, this paper will address another major challenge that faces the community -- standardizing computer terminology in Tibetan. This is another fundamental issue of Tibetan computing, and we report on a related project that has already begun to address this.

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