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