The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization originally founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in modern software products and standards. The Unicode Consortium actively develops standards in the area of internationalization including defining the behavior and relationships between Unicode characters.

The Consortium cooperates with W3C and ISO and has liaison status "C" with ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC2/WG2, which is responsible for refining the specification and expanding the character set of ISO/IEC 10646.

Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for assigning these numbers.   More detail...