GRASS GIS Report 2008
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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