Recent Academic Achievements of E-foto Gnu/gpl Educational Digital Photogrammetric Workstation

The privacy of source code makes, in many situations, commercial application software unable to academic purposes. Such applicative programs are like “black-boxes”, allowing only data input and results output, as a function of the graphical user interface manipulation. It strongly hinders their application to education, since users remains alienated of what exactly is performed in the applicative background. A common proposal for overcoming such limitations is the development and usage of free software. The academic community of distinct knowledge areas is, indeed, being benefited by free software development for educational and research purposes. However, Digital Photogrammetry is a field that remains practically unexplored. One exception is the E-FOTO project, which develops the only GNU/GPL environment for research, teaching and learning of Digital Photogrammetry that encompasses an Educational Digital Photogrammetric Workstation (EDPW). E-FOTO project aims at producing and sharing without limitations with the academic community software and documents. This paper is devoted to the pedagogical design of E-FOTO Educational Digital Photogrammetric Workstation, besides the project main achievements and repercussions. Along this paper, it is shown what tasks of the photogrammetric process should be covered by the EDPW, the free electronic version of the only digital photogrammetry book edited in Brazil, the software tutorials and the self-learning conception of E-FOTO. Finally, the future expectations for this project are enumerated.