Seitenhistorie

(Status: 01-02-2025)

• The Working Group will assist the UNGEGN Bureau in co-operating with the UN-GGIM committee in order to emphasize, promote 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

• 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 toponymic information and to web (gazetteer) services for the provision of toponymic information through the Internet;

• maintain liaison with the United Nations Geographic Information Working Group (UNGIWG) in relation to UN developments and requirements;

• provide consultancy and technical advice to the UN-GGIM activities related to the fundamental data theme ‘Geographical Names’

• promote and support the geographical names database of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN database);

• promote, complement and support the “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 and provide consultancy and technical advice to national standardization programs and to toponymic training courses including the development of multipurpose toponymic database solutions in the context of spatial data infrastructures. This comprises issues like the discussion of appropriate definitions for gazetteers and data types and of general feature types/categories for a global use;

• organize workshops in conjunction with UNGEGN Sessions or UN Conferences, 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 the UNGEGN Sessions and upcoming UNCSGN;

• recommend content and structure of nationally produced authoritative gazetteers and toponymic data files in particular making use of the Internet.

• 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)examine processes and recommend best practice for the exploitation and validation of volunteered geographic information and crowd sourced data as part of national toponymic standardization work.