For your own data, you usually know which character set you have used. However in the communicated data, which is produced by other people or to be sent to other people, it is not always clear what encoding is used. This calls for some way of administration.

In the beginning of 2003, there was no module on CPAN which bothered about administrating information about people. I was in need for a module which allows users of Perl modules to define all kinds of information about people in utf-8. Information like name, address, and the prefered character set for data transport.