The Austrian Board on Geographical Names (AKO) sees itself as a coordinating body of all departments concerned with geographical names in Austria. These include departments with the federation and the countries as well as affected scientific institutions and private cartography. The main aim of AKO is to promote the standardization of geographical names in Austria following the recommendations of the United Nations.
Even before the foundation of the AKO, various work was carried out in the sense of a national or regional name standardization: Firstly by a service regulation of the Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying concerning the collection and writing of geographical names for the Austrian Map 1: 50 000 (ÖK50), secondly by an agreement between the Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying and the Statistics Austria to match the spelling of the place names in the ÖK50 with that of the Index of Places of Austria, and finally by the founding of the Vorarlberg Place Names Commission as early as 1953.