At the 18^th session of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names in Geneva in 1996 a Working Group on “Toponymic Data Exchange Formats and Standards” was formed to investigate and recommend requirements, standards and formats which were available for the encoding, processing, international exchange and promotion of nationally standardized geographical names for international use.

The Working Group completed a survey of requirements for the text encoding of nationally approved and standardized geographical names and a review of the suitability of existing standards.  The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in conjunction with the Unicode Consortium had developed the 16-bit International Standard ISO/IEC 10646 as a solution for the problem of encoding text in a multilingual information processing environment.

The Working Group concluded that most romanized geographical names could be encoded using this standard.