Mapping the risks : assessing the homeland security implications of publicly available geospatial information
Assesses the homeland security implications of publicly available geospatial data and information. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, many agencies within the federal government began restricting some of their publicly available geospatial data and information from such sources as the World Wide Web. As time passes, however, decisionmakers have begun to ask whether and how such information specifically helps potential attackers, including terrorists, to select U.S. homeland sites and prepare for better attacks. The research detailed in this book aims to assist decisionmakers tasked with the responsibility of choosing which geospatial information to make available and which to restrict.
Legal Considerations in the Dissemination of Licensed Digital Spatial Data
State and local governments increasingly license digital spatial data, the dissemination of which by academic libraries requires specific legal and operational considerations to reconcile license conditions with public access. We examined this in the context of the American Geographical Society Library (AGSL) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee during 2000-05. Wisconsin open records law protects the right of access to public records, and geographic data is intended to be in the public domain. Despite this, Wisconsin counties have dramatically increased their use of licenses for geographic data, and the use of these licenses has never been challenged under Wisconsin open records law. The AGSL negotiates existing licenses, conveying to users the licensing conditions and reassuring the data producers. We developed user sublicenses including copyright statements, original licensor's names, and signed user agreements to the terms of the original licenses. Each user agreed that failure to comply with these terms would result in disciplinary action. For security reasons, all licensed data were delivered on CD-ROMs, which incorporated the licensing information, forced users to sign the sublicense, and insured discussion of the licensing issues. To insure consistency, we developed policies and procedures to be followed for each type of data request. We also provided to faculty members and students instruction sessions dealing with data availability and acquisition.
Structural and Process History of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
In the nine years since its establishment in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has attempted to walk the tightrope of being scientifically sound and politically acceptable. This paper investigates how the IPCC has evolved over two assessment cycles. It provides an in-depth examination of important characteristics of the IPCC process including the peer review mechanism, participation of developing countries, and its interactions with the intergovernmental negotiation process on climate change.