What is Unicode - what to call it

Question

NOTE: it is not about usage or implementation, it is about definition

1. Encoding? No. They are UTF-8, UTF-16 and so on
2. RFC? No. They talk about how to implement or transform
3. Standard? Perhaps. could not find any ISO number for it though
4. Specification? Yes.

I am supposed to do some documentation work, and am totally in a fix on what to call unicode? so are these lines technically correct?:

... As per Unicode Specification ..

.. We choose to use Unicode Specification over classic ISO-8859-1 Standard because ...

or should i use some other name for it?

Edit

Thanks to everyone. I am going for The Unicode Standard. Unicode calls itself Standard, as R. Martinho Fernandes pointed out. thanks to his link

Answer 1

Go with Wikipedia and call it a standard, it certainly looks like one based on this description alone:

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, the latest version of Unicode contains a repertoire of more than 110,000 characters covering 100 scripts. The standard consists of ...

A standard does not have to be endorsed by anybody; ie, de-facto standards are simply used by a lot of people regardless of any formal recognition.

Answer 2

Here you go: http://www.unicode.org/faq/

If your lines are correct depends on the context, indeed the term Unicode can refer to different things in different environments.
EDIT: A few examples:
We use unicode strings in our C++ program -> we use wide characters, i.e. wstring or WCHAR, in our source
We use unicode in our HTML -> we encode this as UTF8.
All strings in Python 3 are unicode -> Python strings can somehow represent all characters from ISO-10646