52°North refers to the degree of latitude which intersects the founding organizations' home - the city of Münster, Germany.

52°North - the R&D Network

The open source software initiative 52°North is an open international network of partners from research, industry and public administration. Its main purpose is to foster innovation in the field of Geoinformatics through a collaborative R&D process.

The 52°North R&D communities develop new concepts and technologies e.g. for managing near real-time sensor data, integrating geoprocessing technologies into SDIs, making use of GRID- and Cloud technologies. They evaluate new macro trends, such as the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web or Linked Open Data, and find ways to unfold their use in practice.

All 52°North partners have a long and outstanding record in the Geo-IT domain and actively contribute to the development of international standards, e.g. at W3C, ISO, OGC or INSPIRE.

All software developed within this collaborative development process is published under an open source license. 52°North is a trusted and well established entity in the Geoinformatics arena. Its software is widely used in operational IT environments, research labs and education.

Who participates: GI software companies, research and education institutes/organizations, early adopters, software developers worldwide…

Why: As a 52N partner you have the benefit of being on the cutting edge of technological developments in the GI domain. This opens up innovative business opportunities, competitive advantages and helps shorten ROI cycles.

How: 52°North partners participate in the collaborative software development, much of which ensues from joint R&D activities. According to the respective interest, the level of participation may vary from a focused technical collaboration to a strategic partnership.

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The company

52°North - Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH is the initiative’s administrative office and service center. It functions as initiator and contributor in many of the network’s activities.

52°North GmbH maintains the 52N software repositories and provides its partners with an extensive IT and communication infrastructure to support the collaborative software development process. It actively supports the coordination of activities within and amongst the R&D communities.

52°North GmbH manages the intellectual property rights (IPR) and software licensing for all of the 52°North software. The contributions are published under a Free and Open Source Software License. This gives potential users maximum degrees of freedom to use, adapt and redistribute the software and derivative works in any combination with other software.

Complementary to the 52°North software stack, the 52°North team of IT experts provides support, maintenance, consulting and software development services. It supports the development of high quality software solutions in all fields of geo IT applications.

Our portfolio includes tools and solutions for:

• managing near real-time sensor data
• web-based and cloud-based geoprocessing
• geostatistical analysis with R and GSTAT
• processing ESA-DDS and GEONETCast data
• OSM-based routing and data analysis
• security access to geospatial web services
• working with linked data and the semantic web
• metadata editing
• ...

Legal Structure

The 52°North gmbH is a German company limited by shares, which acts as a non-profit organization. The shareholders receive neither profit shares nor other payments from company funds.The Managing Directors are Dr. Albert Remke und Dr. Andreas Wytzisk.

Our Bylaws describe the mission, organization and procedures of the 52°North GmbH and its Cooperation Partner Network.

More about 52N's history...