The international standardISO 843 establishes a system for the transliteration into Latin characters of Greek characters. Standards are produced by many organisations, some for internal usage only, others for use by a groups of people, groups of companies, or a subsection of an industry. ... Transliteration in a narrow sense is a mapping from one script into another script. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and most of the languages of western and central Europe, and of those areas settled by Europeans. ... Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...
Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts (http://transliteration.eki.ee/) - A collection of writing systems and transliteration tables, by Thomas T. Pederson. PDF reference charts include ISO 843.
ISO 15919 (2001): A standard transliteration convention was codified in the ISO 15919 standard.
The value of Hanyu Pinyin in education in China lies in the fact that China, like any other populated area with comparable area and population, has literally thousands of distinct dialects, though there is just one common written language and one common standardized spoken form.
The initial submission to the ISO was a joint effort between both countries (and was based heavily on Yale), but they could not agree on the final draft.