ISO/IEC TR 14652:2004 specifies a description format for the specification of cultural conventions, a description format for character sets, and a description format for binding character names to ISO/IEC 10646, plus a set of default values for some of these items.
The specification is upward compatible with POSIX locale specifications - a locale conformant to POSIX specifications will also be conformant to the specifications in ISO/IEC TR 14652:2004, while the reverse condition will not hold. The descriptions are intended to be coded in text files to be used via Application Programming Interfaces, that are expected to be developed for a number of systems which comply with ISO/IEC 9945. An alignment effort has been undertaken for this specification to be aligned with the revision of the ISO/IEC 9945 standard published in 2003.