NeXOS Project

The open source software initiative 52°North - founded in 2004 by the Institute for Geoinformatics Münster and the con terra GmbH - is an international network of partners from research, industry and public administration. Its mission is to foster the development of new concepts and technologies in Geoinformatics through a common innovation process. Partners participate in so called R&D communities, focusing on common themes, in particular Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), Web-based Geoprocessing and Cloud Computing, Semantics, Earth Observation, Geostatistics and Metadata.

Over time, 52°North has become a trusted and well established entity in the Geoinformatics arena. 52°North software is widely used in operational IT environments, research labs and education. All software developed within this collaborative development process is published under an open source license.

NeXOS will benefits from 52°North and its partner’s long and outstanding record in the Geo-IT domain, demonstrated through the participation in many research and commercial projects. 52°North is actively contributing to the development of international standards, e.g. at W3C, ISO, OGC or INSPIRE, and is in particular shaping the development of Sensor Web Enablement standards. Besides this direct involvement in the standardization process, 52°North will contribute its implementation of those standards and can therefore build up on a broad foundation of open source Web service and client software.