Since the 2000 ISPRS Congress in Amsterdam, the interest and work in the field of spatial information sciences have significantly grown. As a result, two new Commissions have been formed by ISPRS to respond to these new challenges in the themes of Commission IV. The Theory and Concepts of Spatio-Temporal Data Handling and Information will be addressed by the new Commission II, while the themes of Geodatabases and Digital Mapping by the new Commission IV. The proposed resolutions reflect the new working areas for the new Commissions.

During the first half of 2004 the activities of Commission IV were concentrated in the preparation of the technical program of the XXth ISPRS Congress in Istanbul.

Commission IV has planned during its tenure to address science, technology and applications with a view to promote excellence in the fields of geo-databases generation and digital mapping from air and space-borne sensors, spatial data infrastructures (SDI), image databases and information systems, visualization and web based GIS, digital landscape modeling, global databases, extra terrestrial geo-information systems, geo information systems and industries. The Commission has finalized the working groups on the above-mentioned themes and has planned to carry out its activities with nine working groups and two IC WG II/IV and VII/IV. In finalizing the terms of reference, the main emphasis has been put on the ToRs of the Commission, Congress Resolutions and status of science and technology of each theme.

The following workshops have been organized.

1. WG IV/2: Federated Databases and Interoperability co-organised the 4th International Symposium on Mobile Mapping Technology "MMT 2003" (organized by Com. I, WG II/1, II/2, IV/2,V/5), 29-31 March 2004, Kunming, China.
2. Dr. Monika Sester, Chair of WG IV/3: Data Generalization and Data Mining became a member of the Board of the ICA Commission on Generalization, while members of the WG were planning to participate in the ICA workshop in Leicester in August 2004.
3. WG IV/6: Landscape Modelling and Visualization organized one special ASPRS/ISPRS WG IV/6 session at the Annual ASPRS Conference, 23-28 May 2004, Denver, Colorado, USA
4. ISPRS TC IV is proposing to organise an International Symposium on “GEOSPATIAL DATABASES FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT“ between October 9-13, October, 2006 at Goa, India and will be preceded by two parallel tutorials on “Geospatial databases for optimal utilisation of natural resources“.
5. During this symposium, the Inter-Commission sessions with ISPRS TC II and TC VII have also been planned.