NSF POSE Project 2023-2025 Timeline

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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.

Principal investigators and senior personnel:

  • Helena Mitasova, North Carolina State University (Principal Investigator)
  • Vaclav Petras, North Carolina State University (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Anna Petrasova, North Carolina State University (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • C Michael Barton, Arizona State University (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Huidae Cho, New Mexico State University (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Giuseppe Amatulli, Yale (Senior Personnel)

Other personnel who is joining for the execution of the grant is listed below when relevant.

Y1 1st quarter report

Project Announcements and Communication

Conference Presentations

Training and Workshops

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

Mentoring Program is a new effort started and so-far performed only by the POSE team.

Student Grants Program

Student grants announced with topics at a wiki page. Student Grants Program is an existing effort which the POSE team participates in.

Working Groups

Four working groups created (scope, wiki page, coordinator, and a list of people for each).

Citations

  • GRASS GIS Google Scholar account updated with more complete records.
  • A form was created to collect new and missing records.
  • Profile link added to GRASS website Contribute and Citation page.

Y1 2nd quarter report

NSF I-Corps program

Corey White, Vaclav Petras, and Anna Petrasova participated in a 4-week long intensive mandatory training that draws on the methods, customer discovery, and curriculum of the NSF Innovation Corps and applies them to open-source projects.

The program included conducting 70+ 30-minute interviews with both GRASS users and non-users to better shape the future path of GRASS GIS and the POSE project. So far, the interviews focused on educators, companies, researchers, influencers and it focused more on non-users than users.

Next steps, include processing the collected qualitative data, developing possible future directions for sustainability of the project, discussing these with the Project Steering Committee, the core team of developers, and the broader community.

Mentoring Program

The development oriented mentoring program welcomed 5 new participants from various institutions including universities, USGS, US Army Corps of Engineers, and local municipalities. The discussed topics covered developing workflows for topography and network analysis, environmental modeling, and geophysics. Participants were supported by email and video calls.

Conference Presentations

Presentations and Workshops

  • Intro to GRASS GIS by Vaclav Petras and Anna Petrasova was remotely delivered to geographers at Vanderbilt University in February 2024. The workshop was developed in Jupyter Lab and run using WholeTale online platform.
  • Introduction to GRASS GIS Geospatial Processing by Corey White at SMathHacks hackathon, March 2nd (supported also by Veronica Andreo and Vaclav Petras). SMathHacks is the annual 36-hour hackathon hosted by the NC School of Science and Math, open to all North Carolina students. Students collaborate to build innovative software projects, explore new technologies, and have fun along the way. The workshop was delivered in person with students using Google Colab.

Student Grant Program

Linda Karlovska participates in the Student Grant program with her project Easy command history navigation through the History browser panel mentored by Anna Petrasova (POSE team) and Martin Landa (FCE CTU). Student Grants Program is an existing effort which the POSE team participates in by mentoring.

Code Security

Vaclav Petras mentors four students who create code security improvements in their NCSU class CSC 472: Cybersecurity Practicum. So far, the students created two PRs which were successfully merged:

Two other PRs are open and more work is underway to do first steps for new approach to a more secure code.

Localized Basic Datasets

  • NCSU and ASU teams worked on localized versions of GRASS basic data set following the North Carolina basic data set example, preparing Flagstaff, Arizona and Nepal draft version with basic layers


Y1 3rd quarter report

Mentoring Activities

The mentoring program form received 2 new responses and mentors were actively working with 3 mentees. It resulted in fixes in v.transects and r.accumulate.

Linda Kladivova finished her project developing History browser in the GRASS GUI as part of the GRASS Student Grant Program. Mentor's time was covered by POSE.

GRASS GIS has 3 students this year for Google Summer of Code. Time spent managing GSoC for GRASS GIS was covered by POSE.

The topics covered by GSoC projects are:

Presentations, Workshops, Event Planning

CMake transition

Ongoing work on CMake compilation was partially covered by POSE.

Code Quality and Security

Code quality improvements in Python code:

Vaclav Petras mentored a team of four students who create code security improvements in their NCSU class CSC 472: Cybersecurity Practicum. The team created 12 PRs which were successfully merged, 7 additional experimental PRs (not merged) and 2 PRs which are still open at this time. Specifically, the team achieved the following:

Documentation

Communication and outreach

Other sustainability activities

Y1 4th quarter report

Mentoring Activities

The mentoring program form received 3 new responses and mentors were actively working with 3 mentees. Results include parallelization of r.texture, r.horizon, improved grass.benchmarking library and a new tutorial on lidar data.

GSoC successfully completed their projects:

Time spent by mentoring was covered by NSF.

Presentations, Workshops, Event Planning

  • Planning GRASS Dev summit 2025 at NCSU
  • Planning AGU (4 abstract submitted), AGU booth for GRASS GIS reserved and payed
  • Submitted workshop, talk and keynote to FOSS4G 2024 - Brazil.

CMake transition

Ongoing work on CMake compilation was partially covered by POSE.

Code Quality and Security

  • Code quality and security improvements in C and C++ code are in 36 PRs with fixes for more than 25 tools, specifically in:
    • raster: r.path, r.out.mpeg, r.out.png, r.in.xyz, r.terraflow, r.statistics, r.spreadpath, r.sim.water, r.sim.erosion, r.object.geometry, r.coin
    • imagery: i.atcorr, i.aster.toar, i.ortho.photo, i.landsat.acca, i.segment, i.smap
    • display: d.linegraph, d.legend.vect, d.histogram, d.labels
    • raster 3D: r3.in.v5d, r3.info, r3.mapcalc
    • other: lib/gis, lib/vector/diglib, g.findfile, g.setproj, ps.map, lib/cdhc

Changes by author: ShubhamDesai, Makiko Shukunobe, ymdatta

Several reviewers, not supported by the NSF POSE project, played crucial role not only in reviewing, but also in determining the right fixes.

Fixed issues were reported by Flake8, Coverity Scan, and Cppcheck.

Documentation

  • Veronica Andreo met some GRASS developers and contributors to follow up on tutorials development.
  • 7 new tutorials on time series:
    • Management and visualization
    • Aggregation
    • Algebra
    • Accumulation
    • Gap filling
    • Querying raster time series with vectors
    • Subset, import and export
  • Tutorial on how to set up Jupyter and GRASS in Windows
  • New repository under OSGeo organization to host the upcoming quarto based website for GRASS tutorials
  • PR template created - GitHub Community Standards all checked complete

Communication and outreach

Governance

  • Roadmap and Governance pages added to the website
  • PSC elections:
    • Documented criteria to define people entitled to vote
    • Documented procedure to compile the list of voters
    • Elections announcement sent out

Y2 1st quarter report

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.

Acknowledgements

The funding is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation, award 2303651.

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