Contributing to Open Source Software Development
Enhancing open source software
52°North’s software research engineers not only develop 52°North software, but also contribute to a number of other open source software packages. These contributions take the form of anything from discussions and bug reports to bug fixing and feature development.
GeoNode
GeoNode – a geospatial content management system – provides a web-based application and platform for the development of Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) and the implementation of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). Managed under the umbrella of OSGeo, it has recently been released in version 4.1, with version 4.2 being on the horizon. 52°North has contributed to numerous projects by using and providing GeoNode as an important component for the deployment of Research Data Infrastructures (RDI).
To keep the project on its path, we have contributed to the integration of new OGC services, (cloud) deployment patterns, and improved developer experience. This includes active development of Helm deployment charts for Kubernetes, sharing experiences on Docker setup and cloud deployment use cases, or constructive collaboration on project setup patterns in different development contexts.
The many funded and professional service projects gave us room to participate in the GeoNode community and provided us with good visibility over the past year. One staff member has joined the GeoNode Development Team.
In addition to the GeoNode core development team, 52°North staff also became members of the German GeoNode User Group, where we participate in ongoing discussions and resolution of real user needs. The German GeoNode User Group is gaining increasing visibility and will serve as an incubator for new GeoNode features needed by stakeholders from different domains.
pygeoapi
During 2024, 52°North developers continued their engagement with the pygeaopi OS community. We introduced and discussed concepts of an OGC API – Connected Systems module for prototype implementation with the community.
The OGC API – Processes module was used in several projects and tested for compliance with the official standard. We set up test instances and ran the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)’s TEAM Engine test suite against them. We then discussed the results with the developers and provided them with fixes.
The pygeoapi-odc-provider is a standalone Python library. Our team developed this library as a prototype during the OGC Testbed-17 Geo Data Cube project. It offers a provider plugin for pygeoapi to use Open Data Cube instances as a data resource. pygeoapi makes the data from the ODC available via OGC APIs.
