GRASS GIS 6.4rc5-3

GRASS GIS 6.4rc5-3 offers you a powerful Geographic Information System (GIS) designed for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics/maps production, spatial modeling, and visualization.

GRASS has evolved into a powerful utility with a wide range of applications in many different areas of scientific research. GRASS is currently used in academic and commercial settings around the world, as well as many governmental agencies including NASA, NOAA, USDA, DLR, CSIRO, the National Park Service, the U.S. Census Bureau, USGS, and many environmental consulting companies. 

Major Features:

1. GRASS and network support for teams: GRASS supports workgroups through its LOCATION/MAPSET concept which can be set up to share data over NFS (Network File System). Keeping LOCATIONs with their underlying MAPSETs on a central server, a team can simultaneously work in the same project database.
2. GRASS Programming: GRASS is released under GNU GPL, the source code (5.x: more than 1 million lines of C; 6.x 500k SLOC) is completely available. GRASS provides a sophisticated GIS library which can be used for own developments.
3. Supported platforms
   • GRASS is written in ANSI-C and is POSIX compliant : C-API
   • A preliminary C++ interface is available
   • Architectures: Intel x86, Motorola PPC, SGI MIPS, Sun SPARC, Alpha AXP, HP PA-RISC, CRAY, others.
   • Operating systems: GNU/Linux (Intel, PowerPC, Sun, ...) Solaris (SPARC, i86), SGI IRIX, HP UX, Mac OS X (Darwin), IBM AIX, BSD-Unix variants, FreeBSD, CRAY Unicos, iPAQ/Linux handhelds and other UNIX compliant platforms (32/64bit), additionally MS-Windows native or Cygnus.
4. Import/Export: Data formats supported by GRASS
   • 2D raster data,
   • 3D raster data (voxels),
   • topological vector data (2D and 3D)
5. RASTER: The GDAL library (r.in.gdal) is used, see the GDAL project format list for full capabilities. Examples include:
   • Raster: ASCII, ARC/GRID, E00, GIF, GMT, TIF, PNG, ERDAS LAN, Vis5D, SURFER (.grd) ...
   • Images: CEOS (SAR, SRTM, LANDSAT7 etc.), ERDAS LAN, HDF, LANDSAT TM/MSS, NHAP aerial photos, SAR, SPOT, ... can be read
6. VECTOR: The OGR library (v.in.ogr) is used, see the OGR project format list. Examples include:
   • Vector: ASCII, ARC/INFO ungenerate, ARC/INFO E00, ArcView SHAPE (with topology correction), BIL, DLG (U.S.), DXF, DXF3D, GMT, GPS-ASCII, USGS-DEM, IDRISI, MOSS, MapInfo MIF, TIGER, VRML, ...
   • Sites (vector point data lists): XYZ ASCII, CSV, dBase, ...
   • List of GRASS raster import and export modules
   • List of GRASS vector import and export modules
   • List of GRASS volume import and export modules
7. Data Management capabilities of GRASS
   • Spatial analysis
   • Map generation
   • Data visualization (2D, 2.5D and 3D)  
   • Data generation through modelling (list of simulation models)
   • Link to DBMS (PostgreSQL, mySQL, SQLite, ODBC, ...)