(Status: 20-12-2019)

• 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;

• 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; 
  

• 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";

• promote the use of persistent unique identifiers as crucial element of consistent names data files and for Linked Open Data

• 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 for national, regional and 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.

• 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.

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