52°North – Applied Geoinformatics Research
Advancing concepts and technologies for spatial information infrastructures
52°North refers to the degree of latitude which intersects the founding organizations’ home – the city of Münster, Germany.
Lat: 51°57 ‘ 38.394″ (N) Lon: 7°37 ‘ 34.086″ (E)
The open source software initiative 52°North is an open international network of partners from research, industry and public administration. We foster innovation in Geoinformatics through a collaborative R&D process.
Within our network we develop new concepts and technologies e.g. for managing spatio-temporal measurement data and sharing geoprocessing technologies over the web. We evaluate new macro trends, such as the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web or Linked Open Data, and pave the way for unfolding their use in practice.
All software developed within the 52N R&D process is published under an open source license.
52°North is a trusted and well established entity in the Geoinformatics arena. Our software is widely used in operational IT environments, research labs and education.
Who participates: GI software companies, research and education institutes/organizations, early adopters, interested software developers worldwide…
Why: As a partner, you are part of a network of excellence and 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 network’s collaborative software development, much of which ensues from joint R&D activities. The level of participation may vary from a focused technical collaboration to a strategic partnership.
52°North – Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH is a private research organization, which is the legal body and service center of the 52°North R&D network. The company serves as initiator and contributor in many of the network’s activities.
Our team of geo-information scientists and skilled IT professionals contributes to the network’s research activities and provides professional services such as software development, consulting and training.
We maintain the 52°North software projects, manage the intellectual property rights (IPR) and software licensing and provide our contributors with an extensive IT and communication infrastructure to support the collaborative software development process.
All software 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.
The 52°North GmbH is a non-profit organization, i.e. the shareholders receive neither profit shares nor other payments from company funds. The Managing Directors are Prof. Dr. Albert Remke and Prof. Dr. Andreas Wytzisk.