Academics

By Yakov Smotritsky

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GRASS (Geographic Resource Analysis Support System) is a Geographic Information System initially developed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA-CERL) in 1982.

Data analysis and modeling capabilities of GRASS include:

• terrain analysis,
• population demographics,
• business geographics,
• environmental analysis,
• land use planning,
• spatial visualization,
• digitizing,
• map production, and
• statistical analysis.

GRASS version 4.1 and its five updates and patches were released by the U.S. government and were considered Public Domain. The most recent patch was released in 1995. For those of us who used GRASS for developing our own applications, who appreciated its clear design and powerful features, USA-CERL's termination of GRASS development in 1995 was sad news.

Fortunately for both old users and GIS newcomers, a new version, GRASS4.2, was released by the GRASS Research Group at Baylor University in 1998. The resurrected GRASS Development Team is made up of researchers at Baylor and at the University of Hannover, Germany, with cooperators at the University of Illinois. GRASS runs on all UNIX and Linux operating systems, either through a shell or in X-Windows as a graphical user interface. Latest versions of GRASS are not as difficult to install as older ones.

In October, 1999 GRASS was released under the terms of the Gnu Public License (GPL), making GRASS the first fully featured GIS to be released worldwide under the GPL.

The current stable version is GRASS4.2.1 (version 22). A newer version is in beta testing and is available as GRASS 5.0 beta5. For more information about this remarkable GIS package or to download GRASS source code or binary code, visit Baylor University at {grass.baylor.edu}, or go to the University of Hannover vebsite at www.geog.uni-hannover.de/grass. GRASS4.2.1 is available on a Linux PC at the Academic Computing Services Stats/GIS Lab, located in Tisch Hall, Room LC 7. For more information, please contact the author at 998-3403 or e-mail yakov.smotritsky@nyu.edu.

Posted: October 9, 2000. Last reviewed: March 13, 2007.