OpenDragon: software and a programmer’s toolkit for teaching remote sensing and geoinformatics

Abstract

Continued progress in geoinformatics research and applications depends on educating new generations of theorists and practitioners. Effective education and training in turn depend on the availability of appropriate tools, including software. The OpenDragon Project was established in 2004 to help satisfy this requirement. OpenDragon provides a simple yet powerful platform for hands-on lab exercises and student projects. The fact that it is available in multiple languages and can be internationalized without changing any code gives the system a world-wide audience. It is simple, portable, easy to use, and modest in its hardware requirements. OpenDragon can be used as a turnkey platform to teach undergraduates and even secondary school students about geography, agriculture, geology, meteorology, forestry and other natural resource disciplines. OpenDragon is unusual in that it also provides support, through the Programmer’s Toolkit, for students and researchers who need to program their own algorithms or who want to understand the internal workings of remote sensing and GIS software. This paper describes OpenDragon, its history, and its capabilities. It also explains the system architecture and the organization of the Programmer’s Toolkit, and includes some examples of how we have used these capabilities to support student research and to teach geoinformatics programming.