OPEN DRAGON PROGRAMMER'S TOOLKIT: A FRAMEWORK FOR LEARNING GEOINFORMATICS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Sally E Goldin, Kurt T. Rudahl · 2009
The OpenDragon Project develops and distributes free remote sensing and GIS software to educational organizations in Southeast Asia. In addition to providing a turn-key package that can be used for application studies in geography, forestry, geology, agriculture,and other natural resource related disciplines, OpenDragon can also serve as a testbed for students working on research projects in geoinformatics, developing new algorithms or systems, or exploring the data structures and processing techniques common in remote sensing and GIS. This paper briefly describes the OpenDragon architecture and the Programmer's Toolkit, which provides mechanisms that allow students to add new functionality to the system. We describe a number of student research projects that used the OpenDragon framework. We also discuss two university courses, for very different audiences, that focused on software development for geoinformatics and utilized OpenDragon source code and libraries for examples and assignments.