Research and Development in Geoinformatics and Land Change Modelling at INPE

INPE (Brazil´s National Institute for Space Research) has supported R&D activities in Geoinformatics since the early 1980s.

GI Engineering activities at INPE started in 1982, with emphasis on software for image processing and GIS, which led to the development of the SITIM and SGI systems (1986-1995). SITIM/SGI was Brazil’s first GIS+IP system which worked on MS-DOS PC-286, with a home-grown add-on graphics card that had a resolution of 1024x1024x24 bits. SITIM/SGI had been designed to a very tight level of integration between IP and GIS. It was used extensively by 150 universities and research labs, up to 1996.

In 1992, given recent advances in hardware and software and the changes in information technology policy in Brazil, DPI/INPE started the development of SPRING. SPRING provides a comprehensive set of functions for processing of spatial information, including tools for Satellite Image Processing, Digital Terrain Modelling, Spatial Analysis, Geostatistics, Spatial Statistics, Spatial Databases and Map Management. The software is avaliable free on the Web, and as of June 2008, had more than 100,000 registered users.

Since 2001, INPE has been developing TerraLib, an open-source GIS software library. TerraLib supports large-scale applications using socio-economic and environmental data. TerraLib supports coding of geographical applications using spatial databases, and stores data in different DBMS including MySQL and PostgreSQL.