52°North redefines and strengthens its focus in a new company name

Münster, June 1, 2021 – 52°North is proud to announce a new company name: 52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH.

Established in 2006, the 52°North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH promoted cooperative software development to bridge the gap between research and application. We have since evolved to an applied research institute with a particular focus on spatial information research.

For almost 15 years, we have developed geospatial open source software to bring open and innovative solutions to our partners, customers, and users from the private and public sector. We started as an initiative providing space for contributors and partners to collaborate in an open network. Our network progressed to provide infrastructure and we now work on a variety of research projects with well-renowned clients (DLR, EC, JRC, EUMETSAT, esa, OGC, …). We have acquired substantial competence in the field of geoinformation processing, strengthened our research process, evolved methodology for identifying and championing user and domain challenges and honed our experience and background knowledge of customer requirements and challenges.

52°North’ strives to leverage the use of geodata and geoinformation technologies in science, business and administration, through application-oriented research and knowledge-intensive services. Our team of experts supports industry and administration in evaluating technologies and solutions. The current portfolio covers expert skills in software engineering, management, processing and analysis of geodata. As a non-profit company, we support open science through open data and open source software. Our major interest is in developing spatial research data infrastructures to foster the derivation of information from data. In order to emphasize this new focus, we have changed our name to 52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH.