52°North welcomes four students for this year’s Google Summer of Code®, a global program that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects.

Stipend recipients receive $ 5.000,- for three months of software development. The student developers were chosen from thirty-five 52°North project applicants from around the world. As a first-time Google Summer of CodeTM mentoring organization, 52°North looks forward to mentoring a record four projects!

Following a „community bonding period“ in which they get to know their mentors and prepare for the program, the students will start work on their projects on May 21, 2012.

Sarah Harvey from Waterloo, Canada, will work on the topic of „On-demand transformation of Open Street Map Data into common GIS formats“ (Mentor: Benjamin Pross). This project brings the power of the 52°North WPS to the popular Open Source Mapping project. It will increase the interoperability of OSM data to any GIS and always deliver up-to-date information.

Alexander Kmoch from Wairakei, New Zealand respectively Salzburg, Austria, will broaden the user base of the 52°North Sensor Observation Service (Mentor: Jan Schulte). The project „Exchangeable Encodings for SOS“ will enable easy integration of user implemented encodings for observations to the SOS. Alex will also test that flexibility by implementing a WaterML2 encoding for hydrological time series.

Sidhant Hasija from Jaipur, India, will create a link between the rising Web of Things with standard GIS by implementing the GeoServices REST Specification for the Arduiono-powered SenseBox devices (Mentor: Arne Bröring). Imagine checking and mapping you car’s battery state directly with OpenLayers or ArcGIS. The project „GIS link to the Web of Things“ will integrate these different realms.

Shubham Sachdeva from New Delhi, India, will make Sensor Web Service administrators’ lives a lot easier. The project „SOS Administrator“ will make the installation and subsequent maintenance of 52°North Sensor Observation Services more convenient by developing an initial configuration and installation wizard, as well as a powerful administrative back-end, both browser-based and platform independent.
Mentor: Carsten Hollmann