Managing intellectual property issues in a commons of geographic data

Researchers across a wide spectrum of disciplines - spanning infectious disease tracking, emergency services, cartography, digital communication, and many other fields - depend on locationally-referenced data from many sources to advance human knowledge. Data, in this context, refers to actual data sets such as data on water quality in a lake or stream, population statistics, disease gradients, air quality samples, etc., rather than to textual publications such as scholarly papers or popular news articles. Sources of such locationally-referenced data currently include national, state, and some local governments, as well as large commercial companies. Fortunately, there are many initiatives underway to make information at this large scale accessible to present and future generations. This article reports on progress to date in the design and testing of the intellectual property contribution and management components of the commons of geographic data infrastructure