The Legal Status of CGIAR Germplasm Collections and Related Issues

Paper prepared by two legal consultants for the CGIAR Secretariat on the control, ownership and legal status of CGIAR center germplasm collections, internationally and within their host countries. The document was considered at a joint meeting held in Rome January 30 to February 1, 1992, of the Center Directors Committee on Intellectual Property and the Center Directors/TAC Committee on Plant Genetic Resources, and served as a background document at TAC 57 to the discussion of CGIAR policy on intellectual property rights and related matters.A review of IARC constitutions and headquarters agreements revealed a general lack of provisions for the ownership of genetic material or for its devolution in the event an IARC ceases to operate. There was wide variation among cases depending on the legal status of the center, and the headquarters agreement in effect. In general, however, the consultants' view was that the germplasm collections would not pass automatically to the host government.The authors found potential benefit for IARCs to join the base collections network proposed by the FAO under the International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources, as a means of establishing the international legal status of IARC genebank collections. Agenda document, TAC 57

Examination of Database Supported Spatio-Temporal Intersection Queries

The quickly increasing number of spatio-temporal applications in fields like environmental monitoring, geology and mobile communication is a new challenge to the development of geo-databases. However, the query functionality of todays geo-information systems is still limited to the thematic attributes of spatial objects and to spatial 2D objects. In this paper we present two examples for the definition and database implementation of spatiotemporal intersection operations to be used in geo-scientific 3D/4D applications: the intersection of a spatio-temporal object with a given axis-aligned bounding box and the intersection of a spatio-temporal object with a user-defined 3D plane. Both operations are implemented within the GeoToolKit project. We then show the application of the two operations within two geoscientific applications: the balanced restoration of the Lower Rhine Basin and the generation of artificial, time-dependent landform data in 3D space, respectively. Finally, we give an outlook on our future research work on spatio-temporal database operations