The Whitebox GAT project is an exciting new open-source GIS project. Over the last eight months, I have worked at developing the beta version of Whitebox and am pleased to announce that it is now ready for public release. Whitbox is as much a philosophical approach to gemoatics 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.

Details...

One of Whitebox's most innovative characteristics is that of transparency in software. The concept of software transparency is an improvement over traditional open-source development strategies. While using a tool in a GIS/RS package it is often the case that you may wonder, 'how exactly does this tool work?' You might first try the help documentation, but it may not be detailed enough to give you the information you need. 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 package's code that refers to the tool's algorithm. Even better, imagine that you then had the capability to translate the code from its original source file into a programming language that you can read! That's exactly what transparent software is all about.

See http://www.uoguelph.ca/~hydrogeo/Whitebox/index.html