This field records the provider's own location descriptor for a teaching location.

All providers where Institution.Location entity exists.

This field describes the location identified in Location.LOCID.

In order to address a number of issues from users and providers, including a desire to be able to search for courses by location and supply location-specific accommodation information, a location identifier has been added to each KIS course, with the organisation providing geographic and accommodation information for each location that it uses in its return.

The information returned in Location.LOCNAME and Location.LOCNAMEW will appear in the course characteristics on the Unistats website (See Figure 1 for an example). Therefore, providers should enter meaningful names when returning this field.

Figure 1

Valid characters

The question of valid characters is significant in this field since many names include characters with accents and other diacritics that are not supported by the standard ASCII characterset.

• The general policy is to support all Latin-based characters for names, addresses and general text fields, but not non-Latin characters.
• All Unicode code charts for Latin characters are supported. These are Basic Latin (excluding the C0 control characters), Latin-1 (excluding the C1 control characters), Latin Extended A, Latin Extended B and Latin Extended Additional. This set corresponds to Unicode code points U+0020 to U+007E, U+00A0 to U+024F and U+1E00 to U+1EFF.
• Schemas are built in such a way that an individual project can further restrict the set if required.

The character set chosen will support Welsh and Gaelic languages as well as all European and most other languages using a Latin-based character set.

The Unicode charts that list each of the characters in this range can be found on the Unicode web site. The specific sets that are defined here are shown in the following PDF documents:

• Basic Latin
• Latin-1
• Latin Extended A
• Latin Extended B
• Latin Extended Additional

Files must be encoded with UTF-8 and schema validation will be in place to ensure this. Providers must specify the encoding used in their XML files in the first line of the file (i.e. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>) and to ensure that their files are actually saved with that encoding. If XML files are edited with some text editors and the encoding is not specified or does not match the actual file encoding, there may be problems when submitting these files for validation.