52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH

Data.europa.eu Managed Services

Enable the sharing of Open Data across Europe

This project facilitates the sharing of open data resources across Europe. The central element is the new data.europa.eu portal, which was launched in the spring of 2021. It serves as a core component of the public sector data infrastructure. Data.europa.eu portal offers three key pillars:

• Facilitating the use of public data resources across Europe via a single point of access: The portal offers more than 1.7 million datasets from 35 countries and 102 EU institutions;
• Supporting EU and European public administrations: This includes helping national open data policy owners to build communities of practice where they receive training and advice to improve, sustain and document data publishing practices;
• Socio-economic benefits: Investigating the socio-economic benefits of re-using public data resources and providing incentives to promote the use and demonstrate the value of using open data.

Data.europa.eu is managed and funded by the Publications Office of the European Union. In a dedicated contract, 52°North supports the development and operation of data.europa.eu in close cooperation with Netcompany-Intrasoft, con terra, Fraunhofer FOKUS and Capgemini Invent. A central task is to develop and maintain a component for the map-based visualization of geospatial data. In addition, 52°North contributes to the advancement of the underlying data infrastructure, for example, by exploring how to best integrate near real-time data streams.

In 2023, 52°North focused on the maintenance and evolution of the geospatial data visualization component. This included updating the underlying libraries and exploring how other types of data sources could be integrated into the geovisualization. In addition, 52°North and con terra conducted a dedicated webinar on trends in geospatial data provision with a particular focus on Geo-AI technologies.

Main Contractor: Capgemini Invent, The Netherlands

Netcompany-Intersoft, Luxembourg

con terra GmbH, Germany

Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany

Agiledrop Ltd., Slovenia

OMMAX GmbH, Germany

Publications Office of the European Union
52°North is subcontractor to Capgemini Invent and con terra

Research and Development Framework Contract with con terra

Creating synergies for innovation in Geo-IT

con terra GmbH, Germany

Co-Design to Reveal the Value of Climate Services

I-CISK will empower local communities to build and use tailored local Climate Services to adapt to climate change.

Climate Services (CS) are crucial to empowering citizens, stakeholders and decision-makers in defining resilient pathways to adapt to climate change and extreme events. Despite advances in scientific data and knowledge (e.g. Copernicus, GEOSS), current CS fail to achieve their full value proposition to end users. Challenges include incorporation of social and behavioral factors, local needs, knowledge and the customs of end users. I-CISK develops a next generation of end user CS, which follow a social and behaviorally informed approach to co-creating services that meet climate information needs at a relevant spatial and temporal scale. It takes a trans-disciplinary approach to developing CS by working with stakeholders in seven Living Labs established in climate hotspots in Europe, it’s neighbors, and Africa, to address climate change and extremes (droughts, floods and heatwaves) faced by agriculture, forestry, tourism, energy, health, and the humanitarian sectors. Together with end users, I-CISK will co-design, co-create, co-implement, and co-evaluate pre-operational CS that provide a step change in integrating local knowledge, perceptions and preferences with scientific knowledge. This co-creation framework is unique as it

• links climate impact and adaptation at different temporal scales from (sub)-seasonal forecasts to climate-scale projections, and
• explicitly considers the feedback between human behavior and climate, i.e., between adaptation strategies and options, in a multi-timescale, multi-sector, and multi-hazard setting.

The novel CS will be built on a highly customizable cloud-based web platform that I-CISK develops; freely available, and easily replicable. The I-CISK co-creation framework, supported by online open courses, guidelines, business stories and strategic dissemination, will catalyze the production and adoption of CS that combine end user’s local knowledge with scientific knowledge, contribute to improved decisions and policies, and a flourishing market for end user CS.

Coordinator,  IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, The Netherlands
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), UK
Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), Sweden
VU Foundation, The Netherlands
CREAF, Spain
Uppsala University, Sweden
The Netherlands Red Cross, The Netherlands
GECOsistema, Italy
Caucasus Environmental NGO Network (CENN), Georgia
Universidad Computense de Madrid, Spain
IDEAS Science Ltd.], Hungary
EMVIS S.A., Greece

European Marine Observation and Data Network

Marine data ingestion and safekeeping in/for EMODnet 

The European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) brings together more than 160 organizations to improve the harmonized sharing of marine data. As part of the larger EMODnet context, EMODnet Ingestion 2 works on facilitating the data publication process. This in particular includes the EMODnet Data Ingestion Portal, which helps data managers publish their data following open data principles.

52°North’s role in EMODnet Ingestion 2 was that of an expert on Sensor Web technologies. Based on results from previous projects, such as SeaDataCloud, we supported the consortium in challenges related to sharing near-real time observation data streams. This included not only the development of best practices and guidance, but also the creation of dedicated demonstrators and show cases.

In 2021, 52°North continued to work with several partners to enable research vessels to share their near-real time tracking data using interoperability standards, such as MQTT and the OGC SensorThings API. We further refined the resulting data publication workflow built on top of the Eurofleets Automatic Reporting System (EARS) and described it in corresponding publications.

44 partners from all over Europe, https://www.emodnet-ingestion.eu/about/who

52°North is a subcontractor of Maris B.V., The Netherlands, https://www.maris.nl/