About GRASS

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This wiki page is initially for organizing the writing of a GRASS entry for the "Springer Encyclopedia of GIS", in future this wiki page will contain the article itself.

The entry structure

The Structure of the entry is given by springer. I received a .tex file which I fill with the text when this text is reviewd by the community (and my wife because she's an english teacher :-)).

Inspiration


Issues

Who owns the copyright for the article? Springer? Should the article be wholely original or can it be derived from existing GRASS text? Does that put the existing GRASS website text etc at risk? (let's avoid a Eric Weisstein's MathWorld vs. CRC Press style nightmare [1]) Can we reuse the text (e.g. publish it here on the wiki)

What needs to be done?

The deadline is something about 'late december, after Christmas'

the entry should be 8-12 pages - here is an example: http://refworks.springer.com/mrw/fileadmin/pdf/GIS/VoronoiEncy

Here is some additional information: http://refworks.springer.com/geograph/

Here are the templates: http://refworks.springer.com/geograph/

And here is a list of other entries (as of 2006-11-21) http://www.carto.net/neumann/temp/gis_encyclopedia_toc.pdf


The Entry

Title:

GRASS

Author

Malte Halbey-Martin, Inst. for Geogr. Sciences, Free University Berlin, Germany

Please put your name here when you have written something

Synonyms

Geographic Research Analysis Support Software, GRASS- GIS (Geographic Information System)

Definition (fewer than 250 words)

GRASS- GIS (Geographic Ressource Analysis Support Software) is a GIS- software for geospatial analysis and modelling which has the capabilities to manage raster and vectordata. Additional it supports three dimensional modelling with 3D raster voxel or 3D vector data and contains several image processing modules to manipulate remote sensing data. It comes along with visualisation tools and interacts with other related software packages e. g. R- language, gstat and Quantum GIS. GRASS supports a variety of GIS formats due to the usage of the GDAL/OGR library. It also supports the OGC- conformal Simple Features. The software is published under the conditions of the GNU Public Licence (GPL) so anyone can see the source code, the internal structure of the program and the algorithms which are used. Every user can improve, modify, or extend GRASS for his own needs. A striking advantage of the program is that no licence fees have to be paid because of the terms of the GPL. Programmers all over the world contribute to the software and it is one of the biggest Open Source projects in the world (more than one million lines of source code). GRASS runs on a variety of platforms like GNU/Linux, MS- Windows, MacOS X and POSIX compliant systems. It is completly written in C although a Java version also exist (JGRASS).

Historical Background (fewer than 500 words)

Just working on that.

see GRASS history page: http://grass.itc.it/devel/grasshist.html

Scientific fundamentals

Dunno exactly what I'm going to write here. Maybe something about the structure off the program. Maybe some algorithms which are used and some functions. Model builder and so on...

One distinguishing thing about GRASS versus other GISs is that you are free to explore the source code to study the exact algorithms used.

Key applications

Add applications with citations

GRASS is currently used around the world in academic and commercial settings as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies.

Future directions

Open problems and discussions

  • 3D- Modelling?
    Much of the infrastructure and modules are already in place for both raster, vector, and point data.
  • GUI?
    GRASS will be moving to a new unified GUI for Mac, PC, and UNIX using WxWidgets and Python. Prototype code is already working.
  • Vector network analysis? (route planning, shortest path, etc)
    Much of the infrastructure and modules are already in place, ready for new applications to be developed on top.

Recommended Reading (5 - 15 entries)

Aditional definitions

If there are some definition in our text which would be worse mentioned in the Encyclopaedia...


Contact & Coordination

Malte Halbey-Martin
Free University Berlin
Dept. of Geosciences
Inst. of Geogr. Sciences
Malteserstr. 74-100
D-12249 Berlin, Germany
===============
tel: +49.30.83870409
fax: +49.30.83870755
email: malte at geog.fu-berlin.de
online: www.geog.fu-berlin.de/~malte

Springer contact

Jennifer Carlson / Andrea Schmidt
Development Editors
Springer
233 Spring Street
New York, NY 10016
===============
tel: 212.460.1666
fax: 212.460.1594
email: jennifer.carlson at springer.com
online: www.springer.com
Andreas Neumann <neumann at karto.baug.ethz.ch>
Institute of Cartography
ETH Zurich
Wolfgang-Paulistrasse 15
CH-8093  Zurich, Switzerland

Phone: ++41-44-633 3031, Fax: ++41-44-633 1153
e-mail: neumann at karto.baug.ethz.ch
www: http://www.carto.net/neumann/
SVG.Open: http://www.svgopen.org/
Carto.net: http://www.carto.net/