Welcome to Whitebox
Whitebox GAT is a unique GIS and remote sensing package. It has been developed with several priorities in mind:- It must be powerful enough to be useful for research applications.
- It must be easy enough to use such that it can find a place in the classroom, even at the introductory level. This means that the software must be intuitive and visual appealing with an abundance of rich help documentation. It also means that users should be able to run the software on computers with modest computational power and without complex installation requirements (it should run off a pen drive!).
- It must be open to the point of being completely transparent. Users should readily be capable of accessing detailed information about the spatial analysis algorithms contained in the software. The user should know who wrote the algorithms. We believe that this will help to make Whitebox GAT a useful alternative for teaching, particularly in more advanced geomatics courses.
- It must be flexible and easily customized. Users should be able to create their own custom tools and plug-ins readily and with relatively little effort. We hope that this feature, combined with the ease with which users can view example tools (by clicking the view code button), will help to convert many users into developers, creating a large and strong developer community. To further facilitate this goal, we have designed Whitebox such that new tool development requires very little, if any, file input/output coding and in a way that will enable new tools to automatically handle massive spatial datasets, such as are very common in the current computing environment.
I hope that you enjoy using this software as much as I've enjoyed developing it. Perhaps one day you might contribute to Whitebox's future versions! If you would like to donate your custom tools, development expertise, or money to the project please contact Dr. John Lindsay. If you would like to read more about the Whitebox philosophy click here.