Seitenhistorie

(Status: 2301-0402-20202025)

• The Working Group will assist the UNGEGN Bureau in co-operating with the UN-GGIM committee in order to emphasize, promote and provide consultancy and technical advice to national standardization programs on innovation and research in names collection, management and dissemination as well as to training courses. This comprises the development of multipurpose database solutions in the context of spatial data infrastructures for national, regional and global use;
• organize workshops in conjunction with UNGEGN Sessions or other UN Conferences with "geo-dimension", focusing on topics like data collection, categorization and modeling, database applications or lessons learned through national and international geographical names programs or projects, and, as required, provide presentations on such topics at international events;
• promote and support the geographical names database of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN database);

• maintain liaison with international standardization bodies like the Unicode Consortium regarding digital text encoding in the context of geographical names, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) with reference to the development of exchange standards for geographical names information and to web (gazetteer) services for the provision of geographical names information through the Internet;

• provide consultancy and technical advice to the UN-GGIM activities related to the fundamental data theme ‘Geographical Names’ as well as to the support of gazetteers to the Agenda 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) monitoring;  

• examine processes and recommend best practice for the exploitation and validation of volunteered geographic information and crowd sourced data as part of national geographical names standardization work;
  

• promote, complement and support the “UNECA Africa GeoNyms database/gazetteer initiative";

•  and support UNGEGN tasks and activities;
• The Working Group will monitor the availability of free and easily-accessible authorised digital geographical names data as it is seen as a key driver in encouraging the use of nationally-standardised names;
• The Working Group will provide consultancy to the developments related to the UNGEGN database, UNECA “UNECA Africa GeoNyms database/gazetteer initiative", the INSPIRE initiative, the UN and European gazetteer projects, the GIS web-based World Geonames Application and other projects of developing countries through training courses;
• The Working Group will promote innovation and research as well as technical issues through the UNGEGN Information Bulletin, referencing recently presented documents;
• The Working Group will increase the usage of the online discussion forum by utilizing Wiki functionality in order to investigate on issues and specific topics like e.g. volunteered geographic information, crowd sourced data and Linked Open Data; and facilitating discussions on data modeling and database design, on general issues in the context of data maintenance (like feature classifications), production and distribution in the context of Spatial data infrastructures (SDIs);
• he Working Group will assist in raising awareness about the lack of availability of standardized names by participating and presenting geographical names data topics at national and international conferences organized in the fields of geospatial information management (comprising spatial data infrastructures), cartography and remote sensing;
• The Working Group will continue to arrange meetings and workshops, at least one between UNGEGN Sessions on new trends like Linked Open Data applications, geographical data files re-engineering due to Sustainabe Development Goals' (SDG) requirements or speech technology (a method for the collection and storage of geographical names)promote the use of persistent unique identifiers as crucial element of consistent names data files and for Linked Open Data.