I am a student in the Master’s Program Geoinformatics at the University of Münster. The  Master’s program requires an external semester to gain practical experience. It is possible to either work in a research project at the university or have an internship in a governmental or industry institution. I chose 52°North because I like the idea of creating open source software. Open Source software is more accessible than closed software, in that it is possible to further develop and extend the software, so more people can contribute to it and benefit from it.

During this semester, I will work on two different projects. One project deals with the implementation of an extension for a metadata editor to simplify the search for sensors. In the second part of the semester, I will work on the enviroCar project. The enviroCar project provides a platform to visualize and analyze car data and discover more about driving behavior.

At the moment, I am working on the extension for the metadata editor smartEditor. The software was created by con terra, a company specializing in Geo-IT solutions. The smartEditor helps to create valid XML metadata files according to the ISO 19139 v1.0 standard (XML encoding of ISO 19115/19119)  and the INSPIRE metadata specification (INSPIRE Metadata Implementing Rules: Technical Guidelines based on EN ISO 19115 and EN ISO 19119). Additionally, it provides functionality to upload the data to a server. The editor does not currently support the OGC Sensor Model Language (SensorML) standard. The SensorML discovery profile defines a core set of elements of SensorML. The profile was defined to optimally search for sensors. These elements should be part of a form within the smartEditor. My overall task for this project is to create  a new form that contains the discovery profile elements and make it possible to test if the final XML file conforms to SensorML. In addition, one should be able to  upload the SensorML metadata.

The first step was to design the graphical user interface and define the type of the form fields.

I currently create the form fields and the files which define the transformation between the internal data format and the SensorML format.

My next task is to make sure that the editor can validate the insertions according to SensorML and the discovery profile.