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Grass 5.0 beta to be released on Feb 1st.
GRASS 5.0 will be released on Febuary 1st, the Baylor University GRASS web site reports
GRASS is a public-domain raster-based/vector Geographical Information
System which
processes images, models spatial data producing
images. Source-code for Grass is provided, and it should be
useful to environmentalists and people using the
GPL'd Tiger Line Data set.
There are
quite a few demos of it on the web.
This is good software. I used it long ago to learn GIS. I don't know how many people still use it. ESRI's Arc/Info (http://www.esri.com) is probably the leading one right now.
I hope some of the commercial GIS vendor think about porting to Linux.
For those that might be interested, I got a price Arc Info recently. It's about $18,000 for the basic system. Modules are extra and the ones I've seen are approximately $2500. I don't know how GRASS compares but basic funcitonality seems similar.
Yes, I would definitely like to see more slashdot articles about grass. go grass!
Of course if this program was not free,
somebody would make a new open source one
and call it "Weed"!
ESRI's product line is ridiculous. Arc/Info *IS* bloated. Arc/View is easier to use but uses different file formats. And their licenses are really expensive.
GIS is slowly being integrated into IT in general and I bet Jack Dangermond is right now wondering what to do if M$ decides to announce (only announce mind you) a GIS product - probably with the stupid name like Microsoft Map 2000.
GRASS has got a good pedigree. It does what it is supposed to do. It is open. And flexible. It has a really dated command line interface which makes it difficult to work with. There are some GUIs available for it but I haven't tried them out.
Can someone make an RPM for the 4.x and/or 5.x versions? I found it cumbersome to install on Linux.
More and more IT applications are being increasingly "spatially enabled". Maybe GRASS could be used to do the same for open source software. An interested project would be to get GRASS and MySQL talking.
Anyway, GRASS 5.0 is really good news!
You are right - GRASS likely isn't going to be of much use for you. GRASS has always been first and foremost a raster-based GIS. It does have some very basic vector (and point) data capabilities but these are intended primarily to supplement the raster operations (e.g. data overlay).
As you may have noticed, Arc/Info and ArcView are primarily vector-based although you can obtain the "GRID" and other raster-based modules for these two packages (for additional $$$).
GRASS has been around for a long time (circa mid-80s or so) and is definitely a bit dated. It also suffered neglect for a number of years after its original developers (USACERL - Army Corps of Engineers) abandoned it for COTS (commercial off-the-shelf software).
A private company has released a commercial version of GRASS, primarily for SUN workstations - there may also be a PC version. However, the real advantage of GRASS has always been its freely available source code. This new and much needed release of GRASS (version 5) is a very welcome development.
- MARK
I know what I'll be doing this weekend. My wife is a environmental biologist. GRASS (and some other toys) really helps promote LINUX.
I am currently working on a very alpha version of an arc view like program. Right now I am just working on loading all of the data types that arcview can see, as well as reading and writing their really screwed up project files.
My problem is that I am enrolled full time in school, and working on this project on weekends isn't really getting very far. I am very interested in getting a group of developers together to make this a project. I am currently writing for gtk, but want it to work in windows as well (I work for a gis shop at a california university).
A side project is writing code to create mosaics of georeferenced tiffs. If anyone knows of an open source app which already does this, I would be very greatfull.
If anyone else out there is interested in working with me, please email me at aaron@gic.csuchico.edu.
-tiskel
Sort of off topic, but has anybody managed to get IMS working with Apache. We were thinking of getting IMS, but Apache wasn't under the list of supported servers.
When I called ESRI to ask about support, they said they don't support Apache, and have *no* plans to support it. How typical...
Has anybody tried this? I haven't been able to get my mitts on a copy of IMS to try.
I have used Andrew Williamson's recipe of Arc/View, Samba and Apache to make a pseudo-ArcView IMS thing work. The only drawback to this, is that the page code is in VBScript, so it only works with IE (yuk!)
swgis001@lilrc.org
Yeah, I made a PIA out of myself at the NE User Group meeting. Every new ESRI product and demonstration was greeted with "Does it run on Linux, and if not when will it?" The ESRI-Boston office just plied me with drinks till I couldn't do more than mumble...
I've also sent many e-mails to Redlands asking for a Linux port. There was also more than a few people in comp.infosystems.gis asking about this. Last time I checked the wish list at Linux Journal (?), 77 people had asked for A/I on Linux.
I was told that there would be a Solaris release for 8.0, so I'm not so sure about 8.0 for NT only. There are still many shops using Suns out there, so I don't see them doing this quite yet.
I know that are moving toward using Visual Basic (shudder) in all their products...
swgis001@lilrc.org
There exists an organization called
OpenGIS (http://www.opengis.org). I checked
it out a couple months ago. I wonder if GRASS
is part of this OpenGIS scene. It would make
sense to have the Open Source GRASS support the
OpenGIS things.
OpenGIS is NOT Open Source. While there were ...
indeed some links between GRASS and this
organization early in its initial history,
the current emphasis is on open APIs. The
idea seems to be to allow data access between
different GIS and spatial databases in this
way while still retaining proprietary systems.
Obviously the commercial vendors much prefer
this "solution". It is clear yet as to how
successful these initiatives of the OpenGIS
group are really going to be
If 5.0 can be built by mere mortals I'll make an RPM out of it, no problem. There's a nice tutorial for GRASS at
Leicester University's GRASS Seeds Tutorial
and the place where I got the binaries was the
Grass 4.2.1 Main Page
at the University of Hanover. Why? Because my boss said to... ;-)
Incidentally, getting the TclTkGrass menu interface (and building it from within Grass) is a Good Thing to do if you're a clod like me.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I believe that Digital Chart of the World isn't available any more. Does anybody know if its successor (which I believe is called VMap) is out, where I can get it, and if it can be loaded into GRASS?
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I don't know much about mappoint, but the mapping package which is integrated with Microsoft Office was built by Strategic Mapping, makers of Atlas*GIS.
ESRI bought them out about two years ago. Perhaps Microsoft bought the rights to that product during the ESRI acquisition?
I'd be curious to see how GRASS has changed. I last used it in 1995 and it really pretty much sucked at the time. We did however use LTPlus for our map generation and it was a slick program.
:(
Arc/Info was bloated, it was expensive. But damn did it do everything, and it worked pretty well. Because the application was so massive, ESRI did tend to release buggy code, and you really wanted to wait for like version x.1 or x.2 before using it.
Arc/Info really wasn't a end-user package. Everything you did was pretty much done by writing macros. ArcView was their end-user package, although they also bought Strategic Mapping out a couple years ago so now have Atlas*GIS.
Ohwell, I miss Arc/Info and my mapping days to some extent.
Steve
The raw TIGER data is about 25 GB uncompressed. It's in the form of ZIP archives on 6 CDs, and I have been recompressing it in the form of individual .bz2 files. That will probably get the data on 5 CDs instead of 6, there's about a 20% savings. However, my shell driving bzip2 -9 --repetitive-best has been running since Friday and is still not done (on a Pentium 120) :-) .
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I noticed that you mentioned using ArcView for printing maps. . . I don't know exactly what quality you are shooting for, perhaps it's not important, but ArcView makes really cruddy maps. I believe there are some plugins available (don't remember URL) to port ArcView .shp files over to Adobe Illustrator, which I have seen make some excellent looking maps of high cartographic quality.
/. Weird. It's not a big deal, I suppose interested geographers like myself and other folks that work with GIS would have heard about this fairly quickly anyway.
On a side note--anyone know how Rob's submission thing works? I posted the news of this beta release announcement a couple of hours after the folks at Baylor put it up, and today was the first mention of it on
Cheers,
Joel
Down with ESRI, and open up the MapQuest source code!
This one has been a long time coming...
We use GRASS as the backend GIS for a Web based map query system (http://www.agcrc.csiro.au/4dgm/grasslinks/) it is nice to have a GIS that is free and opensource, and the fact that it has a strong commandline interface makes it easy to script, perfect for CGIs...
Hopefully 5.0 will have better support for Sites lists and NULL values, maybe even 64bit Archs...
:)
With time our datasets grew big, and it is pain to handle them with ArcView. We are thinking about migrating to ArcInfo+SDE connecting to Oracle.
We will be happy to use any tool that works, but after fiddling with GRASS 4.2 I am definitely sure that it does NOT fill our needs.
Any comments?
This is the problem #1. And the problem #2 are sophisticated printouts of that data which are royal PITA to compose in ArcView.
Next, we have plain old RDBMS keeping some statistical data we wish to throw in. At the moment we use 'linked tables' in ArcView to link ArcView polygons to records in RDBMS tables using something like parcell ID as a key. However, very often polygon gets splitted (or joined or deleted) and RDBMS must be informed manually of these changes.
BTW, can GRASS handle attribute table attached to some vector dataset?