Advancing Spatial Information Infrastructures

Leveraging the value of Spatial Information by innovating methods and technologies of the underlying infrastructure

Geospatial data plays a key role in supporting environmental planning, renewable energy forecasts, disaster management, smart mobility, precision farming, risk assessment and many other application domains. Our goal is to facilitate the availability and use of spatio-temporal data by innovating the methods and technologies for creating, managing, sharing, analyzing and visualizing this data.

We believe that applied research is best complemented by the development of operational solutions in order to create a tangible added value in practice. This combination turns scientific results into relevant “innovations”. 52°North supports the development of operational solutions by offering professional services, such as training and consulting
services, software engineering or data analysis.

How we work

We do applied research. Our work starts by targeting and understanding real world problems in selected application domains and understanding the related demands for innovating the information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure. We identify and discuss new approaches and apply common research methods to validate our ideas. Much of this work is experimental software development resulting in prototypes, which may be matured to operational solutions in collaboration with the developer community. A special focus is on the evaluation and adaptation of new approaches associated with current GeoIT trends

Current research agenda

52°North has three labs focusing on specific research fields. Each lab is equipped with a dedicated, skilled team to carry out applied research and develop state-of-the-art open source software solutions. Partners and customers are invited to join our teams in their virtual laboratories to collaboratively address their use cases and research questions.