United Nations Capacity Building in Toponymy

The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), one of the nine permanent expert bodies of the Economic and Social Council of the UN, promotes the national standardization of geographical names, as an essential building block for international toponymic standardization and the production of gazetteers, the creation of geographical names databases, all necessary for location-based services. This requires rather specialized training, unavailable in most countries, and that is why UNGEGN has developed training material, on-line courses and contact courses in order to build on a national level the required capacities for geographical names collection and processing, the creation of names databases and their validating, and the distribution of the standardized names. Since 1982 UNGEGN has regularly engaged in international training courses in toponymy in developing countries. This chapter focuses on the necessary training material to be made available, the structure of these courses, the required expertise of the lecturers and the teaching conditions, the criteria for selecting suitable fieldwork areas, and the necessary hardware and software for student participants. The whole process from collecting the names in the field to their incorporation into databases and their publication on maps and in web applications will be described by the lecturers who have recently been engaged in these courses.