Country Data Processing

This tutorial describes how to

• find free data of country on Internet
• create new GRASS location
• import found data into GRASS
• create new vector layers from existing data
• create labels
• display map of a country

GRASS Installation

Required elements

• GRASS GIS system installed
• download SPEARFISH data http://grass.itc.it/sampledata/spearfish_grass60data-0.3.tar.gz

Create directory structure required for this tutorial

• dataset directory

  $ mkdir ~/grass

• input data directory

  $ mkdir ~/grass/indata

Create GRASS location using SPEARFISH data to be able create new locations

  $ cd ~/grass
  $ tar zxf spearfish_grass60data-0.3.tar.gz

Start GRASS

  $ grass -text spearfish60/PERMANENT

Obtaining Data

We assume that one wants to create UK map. Following steps can be easily applied to other countries' data.

Country related GIS data can be obtained from Digital Chart of the World