News - 52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH

October 26, 2026

52°North signs NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Opennes Commitment

Formalizing our dedication to FAIR and open principles and to the mission of both NFDI and NFDI4Earth

From the very beginning, interoperability has been one of 52°North’s core topics. As developers of open-source geospatial software, we have worked with NFDI4Earth over several years, contributing to initiatives such as OneStop4All, which enhances the discoverability and accessibility of Earth system science data, software and educational resources. Open Science practices are already part of our portfolio, encompassing everything from open licences to training and capacity building. Signing the NFDI4Earth Commitment reinforces and formalizes our dedication to FAIR and open principles and to the mission of both NFDI and NFDI4Earth.

Markus Konkol explains why in a recent blog post: “52°North is ready to sign the NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Openness Commitment“.

September 29, 2026

20 Years of Open Spatial Innovation: Highlights from the 52°North Innovation Summit 2026

Exploring open Geo-IT, spatial digital twins, and responsible GeoAI in Münster, Germany

On September 22–23, 2026, researchers, industry leaders, software engineers, and public sector innovators gathered in Münster, Germany, for the 52°North Innovation Summit. Celebrating twenty years of open spatial development, the event provided an opportunity to assess past achievements and discuss future directions for open geospatial technology, spatial digital twins, and responsible GeoAI.

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September 18, 2026

DIRECTED Launches eLearning Platform

DIRECTED launches new eLearning Platform to strengthen Europe’s disaster resilience and climate adaptation capacity

DIRECTED has launched a new, openly accessible eLearning platform, bringing together practical tools and learning developed with practitioners across our Real World Labs in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Hungary.

Hosted on weADAPT, the platform includes three modules covering:

🔹 Interoperability in Operation
🔹 Integrating Disaster Risk Management and Climate Adaptation Planning
🔹 Public Risk Communication

The modules translate the governance frameworks, technical tools and real-world learning developed through DIRECTED into practical training that can be used by disaster risk management and climate adaptation practitioners across Europe and beyond.

Read the full press release!

Explore the eLearning platform.

September 18, 2026

GSoC 2026 Comes to a Close

Google Summer of Code 2026 is coming to a close for us and our students. We have all had a successful summer and we are delighted with their accomplishments!

Visualized generated route along the weather dataset in QGIS

Shashaank took on the challenge of building a QGIS plugin for the 52°North Weather Routing Tool (WRT). Although the WRT offers powerful functionality, its workflow can be complex. To make these capabilities more accessible and intuitive, the plugin replaces manual setup with a user-friendly GUI – streamlining the process into a seamless Configure → Visualize → Analyze workflow right within QGIS. Find out more in his blog post “From Manual Configuration to an Interactive GIS Workflow – My GSoC 2026 Journey” (Shashaank Srivastava)

Pranav embraced the challenge of creating a bridge between OGC APIs and the Model Context Protocol*, so that large language models can interact with geospatial services through well-defined, structured tools instead of brittle ad-hoc API calls. He details his work ins final blog post Building a Safe and Visual MCP Bridge for OGC APIs with 52°North (Pranav Angrish).

A heartfelt thanks to both of them for their hard work!

*OGC’s Ingos Simonis references Pranav’s introductory blog post in his opinion paper “Why AI-Readiness Is a Data Architecture Problem”.