SPRING is a freeware GIS and remote sensing

Remote sensing

Remote sensing is the acquisition of information about an object or phenomenon, without making physical contact with the object. In modern usage, the term generally refers to the use of aerial sensor technologies to detect and classify objects on Earth by means of propagated signals Remote sensing...

 image processing system with an object-oriented data model which provides for the integration of raster and vector data representations in a single environment. It has Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 and Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 versions and provides a comprehensive set of functions, including tools for Satellite Image Processing, Digital Terrain Modeling, Spatial Analysis, Geostatistics, Spatial Statistics, Spatial Databases and Map Management.

SPRING is a product of Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE), who is developing SPRING since 1992, and has required over 200 man/years of development and
includes extensive documentation, tutorials and examples. More than 70,000 users from 60 countries have downloaded the software, as of January 2007.

More information

• SPRING web site - Official project web site.
• Paper about SPRING - "SPRING: Integrating remote sensing and GIS by object-oriented data modelling" Camara G, Souza RCM, Freitas UM, Garrido J Computers & Graphics, 20: (3) 395-403, May-Jun 1996.