52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH

52°North Student Innovation Prize – Proposal chosen for implementation

52°North is committed to fostering innovation in the field of geoinformatics, focusing on the application of cutting-edge technologies to address real-world challenges. To encourage students and research software engineers pursuing a PhD to develop and apply creative ideas in the geospatial field, the 52°North Student Innovation Prize for Geoinformatics was established.

In this year’s iteration, 52°North has decided to fund the work of Simeon Wetzel, a PhD student at the Chair of Geoinformatics at the TU Dresden. Simeon will work on a novel approach to geospatial data search and discovery in the context of Research Data Infrastructures. His strong proposal identified three major problems with current search functionality in data platforms: 1) semantics of queries are not considered, 2) high quality metadata is a key factor for good search experience, 3) the complex structure of spatio-temporal data is not considered, especially in full-text search approaches.

Simeon will design an architecture that overcomes these limitations by considering Large Language Models as well as AI/ML patterns. The concept will also include sophisticated tools for automatically deriving meaningful metadata from data sets.

The conceptual phase of the project has just kicked off. Over the coming months, Simeon will work on the concept and on an implementation that can be integrated with existing Research Data Infrastructure solutions.

Stay tuned for more!