52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH

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Advanced time series analysis on the web with R

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Filed Under: Communities, Geostatistics, Sensor Web Tagged With: , ,

Today we want to present one of the latest open source projects that brings together expertise from the Geostatistics and Sensor Web communities. The new web application sensorweby successfully integrates the 52°North JavaScript SOS Client with the analytical powers of R and creates a new and completely open source software solution to create advanced analysis and visualizations of time series data.

Find out more about the project on GitHub or Open HUB and try out the examples pages on the Geostaticstics Community Demo Server and 52°North contributor IRCEL-CELINE.
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52°North @ FOSS4G Europe 2014

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Filed Under: Communities, Geoprocessing, Sensor Web Tagged With: , ,

FOSS4G-EIt has been a while since this year’s FOSS4G-Europe conference took place in Bremen; however, we would like to share our presentations and experiences in this blog post. Three members of 52°North staff attended the FOSS4G-E, which was conveniently located in the nearby city of Bremen, and talked about diverse topics involving INSPIRE, the WPS standard, collaborative software development, teaching, JavaScript, and more.more >

GIS data access for enviroCar

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Filed Under: Citizen Science Tagged With: , , , ,

The enviroCar Team recently built a new platform for managing transportation data in the form of “tracks”. A simple but extensible JSON encoding supports the quick prototyping approach within the architecture of the data server, Android app for data collection, and PHP-based website for visualization and social interaction. As the project matures, we encounter new requirements. One of these is to enable users to download the track data in formats that simplify data import to other tools, such as mapping software (e.g. ArcGIS) or tabular analysis software (e.g. Excel spreadsheets), so that scientists and citizens alike can derive new findings and develop new information products based on the enviroCar data.

No sooner said than done, we developed and now publicly release two new export formats, shapefile and CSV! more >

Food for thought – 52°North supports Hackathon at ifgi

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Filed Under: 52°North Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi) in Münster celebrated its 20th birthday last week – congratulations!

Several events accompanied the celebrations. First, members of the 52°North company and network had the chance to attend a high quality scientific symposium with guests from all over the world. Participants listened to inspiring talks by leaders in the scientific domain of geoinformatics, several of them former members of ifgi. On the second day, invited guests took part in a “think tank on Geoinformatics” and the summer school for graduate students opened its doors with the topic “Gamifying Spatial Collaboration”. Students from all over the world discussed and learned about location-based gaming and spatial collaboration during the six days. Invited lectureres Barbara Grüter (http://www.gangs-of-bremen.de/) and Peter Kiefer (http://n.ethz.ch/~pekiefer/) spoke on these topics and ifgi PhD students and Post-docs supported their endeavors.

ifgi 20th anniversary - think tank and summer school participants
ifgi 20th anniversary – think tank and summer school participants

One of the highlights of the summer school was a “hackathon” on Sunday. In the morning, the participants pitched several ideas: a mobile game for measuring emotional state in buildings, a “bet matching” app for spontaneous challenges while on the go, and a mobile game that can be played while driving. The students went for the last option and developed a concept for a location-based in-car game that is not only fun to play and makes your commute more interesting, but encourages players to provide their data to the enviroCar platform. Although the hackathon ended up being a “thinkathon”, the task of designing a completely new game with some bounding conditions was a great experience for the participants. 52°North GmbH supported the hackathon with drinks, sandwiches and snacks, providing energy to fuel the creative ideas that we’ll hopefully hear more about soon.