This year’s FOSS4G Europe took me to Timișoara, the largest city in western Romania. The event was hosted by the West University of Timișoara (Universitatea de Vest din Timișoara).
I travelled there for 52°North to listen, to talk to people, and to present “Optimizing Resource Usage of Interoperable Geospatial Processing Infrastructures with Kubernetes.”
More on that below. The journey took me from the heat dome in Germany to the heat dome in Romania.But now, let’s set the scene.
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In 2026, 52°North celebrates its 20th anniversary. Over the past two decades, the organization has evolved from a small open source initiative into an internationally recognized research and innovation partner for spatial information technologies. Throughout this journey, one principle persists: bridging the gap between research and real-world application by developing innovative geospatial solutions together with partners from academia, industry, and the public sector.
Hi everyone,
I am Pranav Angrish, and this summer I am working with 52°North as part of Google Summer of Code 2026 on the project MCP for OGC APIs: Developing Model Context Protocols for the Suite of OGC APIs.
In my first blog, I introduced the motivation behind the project: making OGC APIs easier to use through the Model Context Protocol. At that stage, the focus was on the idea of a spec-first bridge between language models and geospatial services. Since then, the work has moved from an early prototype into a more structured MCP reference server for OGC APIs.
The central goal remains the same. I want a language model to interact with geospatial APIs through reliable, well-defined tools instead of brittle ad-hoc API calls. But during the first half of GSoC, I have understood more clearly that the hard part is not just exposing endpoints. The hard part is helping the model follow the right workflow: discover what is available, inspect the required inputs, handle large responses carefully, ask for confirmation when needed, and then call the correct OGC API operation.
Hello everyone!
In my introductory blog post, I introduced my GSoC 2026 project on developing a QGIS plugin for the 52°North Weather Routing Tool (WRT), with the goal of simplifying the existing workflow through an intuitive graphical interface.
It’s now time for the GSoC midterm blog post. Over the past few weeks, the main milestones achieved are the Configuration Wizard and Route Visualization modules. This post summarizes the progress made so far and what’s coming next.