The quadrennial General Assembly of ICA votes on the establishment and dissolution of the ICA Commissions: those listed to the left were approved at the 2011 General Assembly in Paris. In addition, some of the research work of ICA is carried out in Working Groups, created by the ICA's Executive Committee to address contemporary areas of cartographic research which are not covered by any one Commission and which can be regarded as shorter-term issues.

One area of interest is the changing landscape of geospatial data collection, distribution, supply and use, notably in an era of significant development in public and open access to data and other geospatial tools. The Working Group on Open Data Access and Intellectual Property Rights (ODAIPR WG) was approved in 2008 under the direction of Lucia Lovison-Golob (Harvard University) with several topics of active investigation specified:

1. Identification of the main policy, legal frameworks and business models within which geospatial data and cartographic material are produced, accessed, and used.

2. Harmonisation of intellectual property rights for geospatial data for cartographers and other users across different domains (such as emergency management and mobile telephony), different countries and in different organisations and projects (such as INSPIRE, CODATA, GSDI and GEOSS).

3. Identification of tools and methods for evaluating the cost and benefits of open and sharable geospatial data for cartographers.

4. Identification of tools for the discovery, access, and use of geospatial data, and identification of different types of geospatial data management and the geospatial data standards that will make enable to different types of geospatial data such as scientific versus non-scientific data and public versus private data.

5. Capacity-building for developing good practices of geospatial data management according to performance, scalability and security criteria.

As part of this daunting agenda, the ODAIPR WG reached out to active members with a range of different experience and expertise, setting up a website and organising a valuable workshop earlier this year at the Bibliothèque National de France. The agenda covered the latest developments in policies, procedures and activities of organisations such as INSPIRE and initiatives such as GEOSS.

The prime activity was a valuable survey, undertaken in 2009, of a wide range of geoinformation professionals, Open Geospatial Consortium members, International Cartographic Association members and map librarians worldwide. Both suppliers and users of geospatial data were questioned and the results showed a varied picture of access. Data producers still rely on copyright as the prime means of protecting their data (53%), whilst 32% use licensing (many using both copyright and licensing). 29% give open access to their data, and of interest is what the future holds for such a model.

In terms of users, the largest proportion accept some form of restrictive conditions (including direct payment), but many users are able to negotiate discounted prices, cost-recovery prices only or even some nominal fee only.

The survey results show the type of obstacles facing open access to data. There is an ongoing struggle between the access, reuse and exchange of geospatial data and the protection of geospatial data through the use of intellectual property rights. As this group's work is of continuing interest to ICA, it seems likely that the topic of IPR and open data will receive more attention in the future.