LEOWorks for teaching Earth Observation - Current State and Future Upgrades

摘要

As part of its educational mandate the European Space Agency ESA is maintaining the EDUSPACE website for learning, teaching and demonstrating Earth Observation techniques to secondary schools. At the heart of EDUSPACE lies the LEOWorks software which began as a simple but effective educational image processing tool, including only the most basic functions for viewing and processing imagery. Over the years the software has expanded in line with increasing availability of satellite imagery and algorithms for image processing. The current version, LEOWorks 3, is able to perform advanced processing operations including data analyses, data manipulation and filtering and includes a selection of GIS tools. In order to benefit from a multitude of publicly available open-source software in the GIS and remote sensing software sector the future LEOWorks 4 version currently under development also follows the open-source idea of sharing source code. Moreover in the frame of its educational activities for Earth Observation, ESA is creating dedicated educational material and specific case studies oriented towards UNESCO sites (both from the natural and cultural world heritage). Examples of related applications with different degrees of complexity, extracted from real projects and results like those of the ESA -UNESCO 'Open Initiative', or others, will be reprocessed using the present and the next version of LEOWorks and explained following a didactical approach, for integration into EDUSPACE.