GRASS GIS
GRASS is? Acronym for Geographic Resources Analysis Support System. GRASS is a Geographical Information System (GIS) software free and open source, licensed under the GNU GPL. There are versions for different platforms.
History
GRASS born At the beginning of the year? As a project of 80? U.S. Army (U.S. Army Corp of Engineering Research Laboratory – USACerl). The development is particularly the case using the C language and UNIX operating system as reference.
In 1996? U.S. Army took the decision to abandon development of GRASS. Users are advised to migrate to commercial systems, while the? Latest version of GRASS (4.1) remains in the public domain. In late 1997, after more than a year, unable to form a new international team that is responsible for continuing development. L? Addition of new modules and portions of software code to the public domain, however, poses the problem of the right? Author. Nell? October 1999 after an extensive discussion of the GRASS Development Team (GDT) decides to grant GRASS (5.0b) under the GNU GPL.
Currently, the software development center based in Povo (Trento Trentino-Italy), at l? ITC-irst, but uses many external collaborators. The project coordinator is Markus Neteler.
Features
Through the system module lets you use other programs such as
- proj for cartographic projections
- OGR Simple Feature Library – management vector files in various formats;
- GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) – File management in a variety of raster formats;
- R for the statistical aspects and geostatistics
Bibliography
- Neteler, M. and H. Mitasova? Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach. Second Edition. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers / Springer. 424pp, 2004. ISBN 1-4020-8064-6, Online Supplement
- GDF Hannover bR: GRASS GIS 6.0 Tutorial, Version 1.2, 2005, Online Supplement
Useful Sites
- Program site
- Open Source Geospatial Foundation
- GRASS Wiki
- GRASS 6 Manual (draft translation from Italian? English)