52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH

KomMonitor is a GIS web application consisting of modular software components that allow local authorities to integrate, link, and use any spatial data and indicators for monitoring processes. It is available as Open Source Software originally maintained by the Bochum University of Applied Sciences. 52°North is one of the main contributors and also provides deployment and operation services to interested municipalities.

KomMonitor implements a coherent system of modular technical components in the sense of a geodata infrastructure. It provides an integrated data infrastructure that enables the linking and maintenance of interdisciplinary municipal (geo) data sets and statistical time series information at any spatial level. Through automated processing functions, new indicators can be derived from existing data sets. Finally, a web application enables the explorative display, analysis and evaluation of spatio-temporal indicators.

All aspects of this integrated data infrastructure are part of a service-oriented software architecture running natively on Docker. 52°North maintains the Docker deployments and provides installation and operations support. In addition, 52°North initiated several activities to prepare KomMonitor for cloud deployments. Our team developed Kubernetes manifest files for deploying KomMonitor within a hosted Kubernetes Cluster. We also run a demo instance of KomMonitor within an AWS cluster, and share our cloud experience with various projects and IT service providers.

In addition, we continued our pygeoapi activities and completed a proof of concept for replacing the KomMonitor Processing Engine with the pygeoapi implementation of the OGC API – Processes. The goal of this initiative is to introduce an interoperable processing interface to KomMonitor that can also be managed by modern workflow orchestration tools.

The OGC API – Connected Systems is one of the latest members of the OGC API family. Specializing in the management of sensor metadata, it intends to be a successor to the OGC Sensor Observation Service and the OGC Sensor Planning Service.

52°North is involved in the respective OGC standards working group (CONSYS SWG), participating in designing and editing the specification. Simultaneously, our team develops an implementation of the specification, validating the developments of the SWG and ensuring their real-world applicability.

The server is implemented in Python and backed by Elasticsearch for searchable metadata storage and TimescaleDB for measurement/observation storage. Part 1 is already fully implemented, Part 2 is actively being developed.