(Status: 23-04-2020)

• 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 geographical names data 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, crowd sourced data and Linked Open Data (LOD) as part of national geographical names standardization work;
  

• 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, amongst others, Linked Open Data.