Google Data

We recently wrapped up our summer blog series highlighting new Google Summer of Code organizations. Now it’s time to feature some of the 130+ veteran organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code 2013. Each Friday for the next few months, we will spotlight a veteran organization and the projects their students worked on over the summer. To kick it off, the organization administrator from 52°North talks about their project and their second year as a mentoring organization.

The open source software initiative 52°North is an open international network of partners from research, industry and public administration. Its main purpose is to foster innovation in the field of Geoinformatics through a collaborative R&D process. The R&D process takes place within 52°North R&D communities, which develop new concepts and technologies (examples include: for managing near real-time sensor data, integrating geoprocessing technologies into SDIs, and making use of GRID and Cloud technologies). These communities evaluate new macro trends, such as the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web or Linked Open Data, and find ways to unfold their use in practice. 

As a returning Google Summer of Code mentoring organization, 52°North was particularly thrilled to have four students work on different projects in the fields of Sensor Web, Geostatistics and Geoprocessing this summer. 52°North’s overall goals for the projects were to improve the usability of the products and extend the user base to new domains. 

Khalid Alqinyah created a new admin web application for the 52° North Web Processing Service (WPS). This new application will improve the WPS back end code with an updated implementation and provide the front end with a new and ergonomic user interface. 

Patrick Noble added support for seismic data within the 52° North Sensor Observation Service. This seismic data will then be visualized by the Sensor Web Client. The result of his work will be a comprehensive toolkit for publishing and visualizing seismic data.
Jinlong Yang developed classes and methods that enable trajectory analysis in the R language. We expect this enhancement to become a valuable tool for all researchers dealing with trajectory data as it will open up R for a whole range of new application scenarios. 

Mohammad Ahmed Hamed Yakoub implemented the Open Sensor Search (OSS) idea in an agile software development process. OSS is a platform for the discovery of in-situ sensor data. The resulting discovery solution will become a cornerstone within the 52°North Sensor Web framework, allowing the development of more sophisticated client applications. 

By Jan Schulte, 52°North Organization Administrator

Currently, students are busy putting the finishing touches on their projects and starting next week they will submit the code they have been working on these last 3 months. Good luck to all the students in these final days of Google Summer of Code 2013.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs