Advancing Spatial Information Infrastructures
Leveraging the value of Spatial Information by innovating its methods and technologies
Spatial data plays a key role in supporting environmental planning, renewable energy forecasts, disaster management, smart mobility, risk assessment and mitigation 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.
52°North pursues three interwoven disciplines.
- Research Data Infrastructures: The development of RDIs builds upon our experience in Spatial Data and Spatial Information Infrastructures (SDI/SII). A central component is the provision of Analysis Ready Data (ARD) for subesquent processing and analysis workflows. This is closely linked to Spatial Data Science.
- Spatial Data Science: The true value of available data sets can only be leveraged if the data is turned into information. Employing classical and modern Machine Learning (ML) approaches, we facilitate this transition.
- SDI research: This addresses the technical solutions used to bring the RDI and analysis to life. Researching and developing new SDI architectures and concepts on modern IT systems unlocks the true potential of spatial 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.
