GRASS GIS
Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS GIS)
GRASS GIS is an open-source Geographic Information System used for data management, image processing, graphics production, spatial modelling, and visualizations of various data types.1
History
A branch of the US Army Corp of Enineers called the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories(USA-CERL) began developing GRASS GIS as a tool to perform boolean operations on multiple rasters and was quickly adopted by a host of National Agencies. With over 30 years of development under its belt, GRASS is currently used by NASA, NOAA, USDA, DLR, CSIRO, the National Park Service, the U.S. Census Bureau and the USGS.
Features
GRASS differs from other GIS applications in that it works both as a stand-alone application and as an embedded library in QGIS. GRASS is also available through a Graphical User Interface, Command Line, or a host of language interfaces including Python, R, Java, PHP and C++.
GRASS is also distinct in that all datasets are stored in text documents. The environment variables and datasets metadata are stored in separate files to allow the program to quickly scan through the metadata.
GRASS supports the following types of datasets:
- Vector
- Raster
- LiDAR
- Time series
- Vector Networks
- 3D
- Spatial SQL
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GRASS Development Team, 2012. Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) Software. Open Source Geospatial Foundation project. http://grass.osgeo.org ↩