The FAO geopolitical ontology and related services have been developed, in the context of the FAO Country Profiles project, to facilitate data exchange and sharing in a standardized manner among systems managing information about countries and/or regions.

The geopolitical ontology ensures that FAO and associated partners can rely on a master reference for geopolitical information, as it manages names in multiple languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Italian); maps standard coding systems (UN, ISO, FAOSTAT, AGROVOC, etc); provides relations among territories (land borders, group membership, etc); and tracks historical changes.

In addition, in order to facilitate the exploitation of this reference data by information systems, various services have been developed on top of this resource:

• The geopolitical ontology module maker: this service allows extracting smaller modules of the ontology and exporting them in RDF, XML or CSV formats, using a web interface. 
• The geopolitical ontology web services: these RESTful web services allow to access ontology data on demand.