The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) supports the implementation of global development agendas, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In line with the recently adopted Pact for the Future (2024), UNGEGN has advanced the preservation and standardized use of culturally significant geographical names—particularly Indigenous ones—by developing practical guidance to help Member States strengthen their naming practices. This supports inclusion and representation by ensuring that these names are properly recognized and maintained. Consistent with the outcomes of the Second World Summit for Social Development and the Sevilla Commitment (2025), UNGEGN underscored that geographical names are vital intangible cultural heritage, carrying linguistic, historical, and ecological knowledge that reinforces identity, social cohesion, and intergenerational learning. Many Indigenous toponyms also contain important environmental information that can inform climate adaptation and risk reduction.

Standardized geographical names underpin national priorities and global development agendas by enabling coherent data integration across sectors such as poverty reduction, sustainable agriculture, climate resilience, land administration, the blue economy, supply chain management, health, food security, human rights, and technology development. In this regard, while the SDGs are global in nature, their achievement largely depends on local action. Local governments, communities, and individuals play a critical role in implementing the SDGs by tailoring them to the specific needs and priorities of their local context. Although three SDG indicators directly necessitate reporting at the city level, namely indicators 11.2.1, 11.6.1, and 11.7.1, almost all SDG indicators are relevant at the local level. In this regard, standardized geographical names are a key resource for Member States, as they are the “glue” that helps bind local, national, and global data together.

The workshop on the use of interoperability standards for the management of geographical names, held under the theme “Linking Geographical Names, the Disaggregation and Localization of Sustainable Development Goals and the Semantic Web”, provided an important opportunity to examine the role of unique identifiers for geographic entities, such as countries, cities, and physical features, as a means of removing the ambiguity of multiple toponyms and enabling the integration of data for the SDGs. It highlighted the importance of both bottom-up and top-down toponymic metadata management efforts led by National Geospatial Name Authorities (NGNAs), National Geospatial Information Agencies (NGIAs), and National Statistical Offices (NSOs).

Through convening representatives of NGNAs and technical experts from UNGEGN, the workshop developed national technical capacity in the area of geographical names standardization. Participants examined the characteristics of good practices in linked open data infrastructure within their national contexts; developed machine-readable, AI-ready gazetteers from their national data within Zenith, a tool developed by UN Data for managing structured geographical names; and considered how such national data could be integrated with the World Geographical Names Database. This approach strengthened understanding of how geographical names data can be structured and managed in a consistent and interoperable manner at the national level, supporting its federation into the WGN Database. The workshop also considered how such linkages can include names in all six UN languages and incorporate endonyms, native forms of place names, where provided by participating Member States. Further, participants shared and learned from the experiences of countries and international agencies in the area of standardized geographical names and their dissemination.