52°North refers to the degree of latitude which intersects the founding organizations' home - the city of Münster, Germany.
52°North - the R&D Network
The open source software initiative 52°North 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, such as Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) or web-based Geoprocessing, for example.
All software developed within this collaborative development process is published under an open source license.
The 52°North partners have a long and outstanding record in the Geo-IT domain. They are actively contributing to the development of international standards, e.g. at W3C, ISO, OGC or INSPIRE.