The Thünen Institute is on the verge of migrating their existing Thünen Atlas (atlas.thuenen.de), which is based on GeoNode 3.x, to the next major release, version 4.1. As part of this effort, they identified several features to improve the user experience and the platform’s capabilities for data exploration and analysis. 52°North and the Thünen Institute worked together to implement this set of new features. It covered several thematic aspects. The main focus was on:

• Improvements for map delivery by extending the default MapStore2 widgets and views,
• Automatic synchronization of datasets across multiple GeoNode instances to improve publication workflows,
• Support for tabular (non-spatial) datasets and their visualization in dashboards.

The team of software engineers executed the project using agile software development methods. In addition to the technical development, a strong focus was placed on communication with the GeoNode developer community. While developing the features, a number of improvements were made to the GeoNode core source code. We presented these changes to the community, discussed and finally integrated them into the upstream GeoNode project.

At the of end 2023, a follow-up project was initialized. The focus here will be on the publication of meaningful and standards-compliant metadata (e.g., fulfilling the requirements of the GDI-DE Testsuite). In addition, we will enhance and optimize some of the newly implemented features.