The Global Software Institute has announced that a new GIS software suite will be made available to schools and universities that wish to use it as a teaching tool.
OpenDragon offers a full suite of image analysis and raster GIS capabilitie, including image enhancement, supervised and unsupervised classification, geometric correction, measurement and statistics, vector capture and display, slope, aspect and buffer calculations, and multi-criterion decision making.
Sally E. Goldin, president of GSI, said schools, colleges and universities need robust, high-quality software for geoinformatics teaching and research.
"Commercial software is too expensive, especially for lesser-developed countries, while 'home grown' software is frequently buggy or incomplete,” she said.
“OpenDragon fills the gap by providing a wide range of core geoinformatics functions in an integrated, easy-to-use package. The toolkit is especially useful for faculty and graduate students who need to develop and evaluate their own algorithms."
OpenDragon is a free offshoot of the commercial Dragon/ips system from Goldin-Rudahl System and has English, Thai, Czech, French, Russian, Bahasa Indonesian and Brazilian Portuguese interfaces.
The Global Software Institute will also make the source code for OpenDragon available for non-commercial use under an open source licence during the next six to nine months.
Users interested in downloading OpenDragon should visit the website for details.
