NSF POSE Project 2023-2025 Timeline

To inform GRASS community about the work done as part of the award 2303651 from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to enhance GRASS ecosystem, the following report summarizes the progress and outcomes in quarterly reports and presents the roadmap for the project.

The two main goals of the project are: 1) to facilitate the adoption of GRASS GIS as a key geoprocessing engine by a growing number of researchers and geospatial practitioners in academia, governments, and industry; and 2) to expand and diversify the developer community, especially through supporting next-generation scientists to gain expertise to maintain and innovate GRASS software.

1st quarter report

Project announcement and info session

• Announcement on GRASS website
• Info session to explain the POSE Project (Announcement on GRASS user mailing list)
• Set up collecting statistics from GitHub, X and others

GRASS GIS conference presentations

• Parallelization Tips for Geoprocessing with GRASS GIS by Anna Petrasova at FOSS4GNA, October 2023.
• GRASS GIS: Not What You Think by Vaclav Petras at FOSS4GNA, October 2023.
• Computational Notebooks for Reproducible Geospatial Computation in Research and Education by Caitlin Haedrich at FOSS4GNA, October 2023.
• State of GRASS GIS: 40 Years Strong and Counting by Huidae Cho at FOSS4G Asia, November 2023.

GRASS GIS workshops

• Unlock the power of GRASS GIS by Anna Petrasova and Caitlin Haedrich at FOSS4GNA, October 2023.
• Develop Geospatial Workflows and Custom Tools with GRASS GIS by Vaclav Petras and Corey White at FOSS4GNA, October 2023.
• Big Data Computing with GRASS GIS by Anna Petrasova and Vaclav Petras at NC State GIS week, November 2023.

OSGeo Community Sprint participation

Anna Petrasova and Vaclav Petras remotely participated in OSGeo 2023 code sprint doing PR reviews and maintenance of GRASS GIS code, documentation, and website.

Mentoring program

Development-oriented mentoring program announced

• wiki page
• 4 participants (from 12 responses), supported by email and video calls

Resulted in improvements to GRASS GIS core and addons:

• merged PR: grass.script: ensure memmap content is flushed before writing to a raster
• radar addon toolset PR: Add i.saocom and i.sar toolsets

Student grants

Student grants announced with topics at a wiki page

Working Groups created

4 working groups created

Google Scholar update

GRASS GIS Google Scholar account updated with more complete records

• a form was created to collect missing records
• added to GRASS website Contribute and Citation page

GRASS GIS training

Geocomputation and Machine Learning for Environmental Applications training course announced. GRASS GIS part free of charge led by Giuseppe Amatulli.

Roadmap

Mentoring program (fall 2023 - summer 2025)

Free developer-oriented mentoring program to support researchers and software developers to integrate GRASS GIS into their workflows and contribute to GRASS GIS.

Streamline contributor onboarding (spring 2024 - fall 2024)

Includes updating and creating guidelines for code and non-code contributions.

Streamline user onboarding (spring 2024 - fall 2024)

Includes modernizing tool documentation, developing tutorials.

Creating sample datasets for localized tutorials.

Developing online training materials for big data processing.

Training sessions (fall 2023 - summer 2025)

Local training sessions (at universities and conferences) introducing GRASS GIS to students and researchers.

Training program for big data processing delivered online.

Engaging industry partners (January - August 2024)

Identify and engage industry partners to gather feedback and to start industry partnership program.

Conferences

Presence (talks, workshops, networking) at FOSS4GNA 2023, FOSS4G Asia 2023, AGU 2023, CSDMD 2024, FOSS4G Europe 2024, FOSS4G 2024, AGU 2024

Community sprints

Virtual or in-person participation in OSGeo community sprints, GRASS GIS community sprints

Software distribution (January 2024 - December 2024)

Transition to CMake build system

Develop conda package

Simplify maintenance of GRASS integrations with QGIS and R (2024-2025)

Virtual meetings with QGIS and R developers and GRASS GIS developers (spring 2024).

Identify and implement improvements to the integration.

Improve code quality, security, and quality assurance

Code quality (Flake8, Pylint, Cppcheck), first half of 2024.

Security (CodeQL), second half of 2024.

Quality assurance (better pytest integration), second half of 2024.

In-person developer summit (spring/summer 2025)

Hosted by NC State University, Raleigh, NC, USA.

Identify additional challenges for adoption of GRASS GIS as geoprocessing engine.

Long-term planning beyond the POSE project.