GRASS GIS Report 2008

GRASS GIS

 * Contact name: Markus Neteler
 * Web site: http://grass.osgeo.org

Key Accomplishments
Major software releases:
 * GRASS 6.3.0 released - a technology preview (announcement)
 * GRASS 6.4.0 prepared and release candidates published (details)
 * Work on GRASS 7 started
 * Integration of GRASS into the OSGeo4W installer now active and productive
 * In total 22 TB of downloads from grass.osgeo.org in 2008: (detailed statistics; not including downloads from mirror sites)

Users and developers:
 * New developers acquired: 5 to main archive, 12 to AddOns repository.
 * More than 1000 subscribers in the grass-user mailing list
 * (470 in grass-dev, many more in the other GRASS mailing lists)


 * Three Google Summer of Code projects awarded and completed.
 * Translations: more than 10 languages are well supported

Books and book chapters:
 * 3rd edition of Neteler and Mitasova's GRASS Book published by Springer, an important milestone for the community that such a book has been published (repeatedly) by a major scientific publishing house
 * Chapter about GRASS published in Open Source Approaches in Spatial Data Handling.

Visibility at conferences and workshops:
 * 29 Sep-3 Oct 2008: FOSS4G 2008 Conference, Cape Town, South Africa
 * 18-19 Sep 2008: Geoinformatics FCE CTU 2008 Conference, Prague, Czech Republic
 * 8-9 May 2008: 3° Workshop Open Source, Free Software e Open Format nei processi di ricerca archeologica, Padua, Italy
 * 1-3 Apr 2008: FOSSGIS 2008, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany
 * 3-5 Mar 2008: II Open Source GIS Users Meeting (Spanish FOSS)
 * 21-22 Feb 2008: IX Meeting degli Utenti Italiani di GRASS - GFOSS, Perugia, Italy

Areas for Improvement

 * An automated build environment, especially for the OSGeo4W installer is desired
 * Development of a framework for efficient and semi-automated translations of the 400+ module help pages
 * Unrelated to the GRASS development: a SVN history "annotate" ability for Trac source code browser would be helpful

Opportunities to Help

 * Find more translators among the (power) users
 * Publish more "GRASS use cases" in the GRASS Wiki to inspire newcomers
 * We require more volunteers for help with native MS Windows packaging and testing
 * Crossover with QGIS: QGIS grass-plugin and toolbox maintainer(s) required

Outlook for 2009

 * Vector topology speedup
 * Overhaul of raster library
 * Partially addition of parallelization (mostly using openMP)
 * Cartography GUI extension programmed
 * Further participation in Google Summer of Code (we hope)
 * Stability on MS Windows leading to incredible gain of new users
 * Move/removal of web-svn documentation to our MediaWiki site; move/removal of development material from MediaWiki to our TracWiki site