Photo: The FalconView development team from the Georgia Tech Research Institute displays the new open-source version of FalconView software. (Georgia Tech photo: Gary Meek)

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has released an open source version of its popular FalconView software. The program displays topographical maps, aeronautical charts, satellite images and other maps, along with overlay tools that can be displayed on any map background. The new open source version of FalconView was described during a presentation on August 12 at the Military Open Source Software conference in Atlanta.

The U.S. Department of Defense has used the FalconView software program since the 1990s to analyze and display geographical and other data crucial to mission planners. The program's ease of use, open architecture and interoperability all contribute to its popularity. There were an estimated 45,000 users before the open source version was released.

"We are excited to broaden our user base outside of the Department of Defense," said Chris Bailey, GTRI principal research engineer and FalconView project director. "We expect that individual municipalities, including state, city and town governments; police forces; architects; environmental researchers; and utility companies will be among those who will benefit from this new FalconView open source software."

Police forces can plot information on burglaries, robberies, sex crimes and other major incidents on maps in FalconView, according to Bailey. School districts can reformat school zones easily using a number of different data analyses and visualization techniques. FalconView can also be valuable for companies trying to determine the best location for their business to meet customer needs.

Image: Global positioning system data is overlaid on this topographic map, allowing users to track their movements on a "moving" map in FalconView. (Image courtesy of the Georgia Tech Research Institute)

In the past, the U.S. Department of Defense typically funded companies to develop software and these companies rarely shared the source code, which led to "knowledge monopolies" because there were usually not mechanisms for secondary vendors to make improvements to the software, Bailey said. Open source practices allow third parties to freely use source code and provide formal mechanisms to submit improvements or patches back to the main source code repository. With open source software, bugs are typically caught and repaired faster.

Since FalconView already had hundreds of registered developers creating "plug-in" tools for the software, and because third parties within the Department of Defense had developed programs that were integrated with FalconView, the software was a perfect candidate for becoming open source.

In July 2008, the U.S. Air Force Office of Advanced Systems and Concepts funded GTRI to create the open source version of FalconView, which involved removing components that were not applicable to non-defense users and code that depended on classified data. Since its release on June 22, 2009, more than 1,000 copies of open source FalconView have been downloaded from the FalconView Web site.

The Windows-based FalconView software package allows users to view many different imagery formats, including popular GIS formats and KML, which is the code used by Google Earth and Google Maps. Municipalities can upload archived maps of their localities into FalconView and users can also download topographical, nautical, aeronautical and satellite maps from the Internet for use in FalconView.

Image: The FalconView software package allows users to view many different imagery formats, including geographic information systems formats and KML, which is the code used by Google Earth and Google Maps. (Image courtesy of Georgia Tech Research Institute)