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_______________________
News
Do you want to stay up-to-date with
Whitebox releases, news, and development issues? Send an
email to me (jlindsay(at)uoguelph.ca) with the subject
heading Whitebox email list and I’ll put you on the
Whitebox email list.
(05/11/2012)
Follow the Whitebox blog at:
http://whiteboxgeospatial.wordpress.com
(02/10/2012)
Whitebox GAT (version 2.0.3) is now
available for download.
Enjoy! (05/09/2012)
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Whitebox Geospatial
Analysis Tools
Whitebox GAT 2.0 is
here!
Many of you have been
asking when a new version of Whitebox would be released.
Well we've been very busy working on it, and now we're
are excited to announce that the new version of Whitebox
GAT has finally arrived. You can download the program
and source code here.
Whitebox has been completely re-written. The main reason
for this was to allow Whitebox to be truly
multi-platform, running equally well on MS Windows, Mac
OS, and Linux. This has been a major undertaking and as
such there are still a few tools and features from
Whitebox 1.0.7 that need to be translated over to the
new version. We are looking for volunteers
to help with the work yet to be done (including working
on the help documentation, testing and reporting bugs).
Whitebox is now written using Java, the world's most
popular multi-platform programming language. There have
also been many additions to version 2.0, including
support for displaying vector ShapeFiles, plenty of new
tools, and an improved user
interface. As always, we welcome any feedback to
help improve the software. Please contact Prof.
John Lindsay with any comments.
About the Whitebox GAT
Project
The Whitebox GAT project
is an exciting open-source GIS project. Whitbox is as
much a philosophical approach to geomatics as it is a
GIS/Remote Sensing package. This philosophy of
transparency, from which Whitebox derives its name, has
led to the development of some rather unique and
innovative features in the software. To learn more about
this philosophy of transparent GIS/RS, please follow
this link.
Whitebox GAT has its
origins embedded in an older freeware GIS/RS software,
the Terrain
Analysis System (TAS). Whitebox offers some real
improvements over this older software. This includes the
following:
1. Whitebox
is open-source
and transparent software. The concept of software
transparency that has guided the development of Whitebox
is a very novel contribution and improvement over
traditional open-source development strategies that we
hope will encourage an active development community.
Imagine using a GIS for a specific application or
teaching. You may use a certain tool and wonder, 'how
exactly does this work?' You might first try the help
documentation, but it may not be detailed enough (i.e.
down to the level of the implemented algorithm) to give
you the information you desire. Now image that you could
press a single button that is on the tool's dialog box
and it would bring you to the very page in the enormous
library of the GIS packages code that is the tool's
algorithm. That's exactly what transparent software is
all about.
2. Whitebox
possesses a new process for accessing spatial data that
allows for the processing of much larger (massive)
spatial datasets.
3.
Whitbox is extendible.
Users are able to create and embed custom tools that
take advantage of the Whitebox user-interface and
functionality to the same degree of integration as
built-in functions. It is possible to write plugins
using either the Java programming langauge or to write
scripts using either jython (Python for Java),
JavaScript, or Groovy.
4.
Whitebox has very good documentation. Each tool has rich
documentation built into the tool dialog box and the
software has an excellent help program. The help for
each tool also documents who wrote the help and the tool
algorithm and when. This is also part of Whitebox's
transparent philosophy. The user has a right to know who
created the tool.
5. Whitebox
is easy to use, despite being a powerful software
package for performing advanced geospatial analysis
operations. This fact, combined with the rich help
documentation and the ability to easily drill down into
the workings of each tool's algorithm, makes Whitebox
ideal for education as well as research.
John
Lindsay
Department of Geography
University of Guelph
(19/04/2012)
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