GRASS GIS Reviews and details

Questions & Answers

1. How would you describe your primary audience?

   GRASS GIS primarily caters to geospatial professionals, researchers, and students in fields like geography, environmental science, urban planning, and geology. It is also used by government agencies and non-profit organizations for spatial data analysis and environmental modeling.

2. Who are some of the biggest customers of GRASS GIS?

   As an open-source tool, GRASS GIS doesn't have "customers" in the traditional sense. However, it is widely used by various government agencies, academic institutions, and environmental organizations worldwide. Notable users include space agencies, numerous universities and research institutions as well as companies involved in geospatial studies and analysis.

3. What's the story behind GRASS GIS?

   GRASS GIS was initially developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a tool for land management and environmental planning. It was first released in the early 1980s and has since evolved into a robust, multi-functional GIS platform, largely due to contributions from a global community of developers. GRASS GIS is a founding member project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo.org).

4. What makes GRASS GIS unique?

   • Open-Source and Free: GRASS GIS is completely open-source, allowing users to freely use, modify, and distribute it.
   • Advanced Geospatial Capabilities: It offers a wide range of tools for spatial modeling, geostatistics, and data management, making it suitable for advanced geospatial analysis.
   • Strong Community Support: Being open-source, it has a strong community of developers and users contributing to its continuous improvement.
   • Integration with Other Open-Source Tools: It can be integrated with other open-source GIS software like QGIS, providing a comprehensive GIS solution.

5. Why should a person choose GRASS GIS over its competitors?

   • Cost-Effectiveness: Being free and open, it is an excellent choice for those with a strong need for quality.
   • Customizability: Users can customize and extend its functionalities to suit their specific needs.
   • Comprehensive Geospatial Functions: It offers a wide range of geospatial functions that are comparable, and sometimes superior, to those in proprietary GIS software.
   • Strong Data Handling: It can handle large datasets efficiently, which is beneficial for complex geospatial analyses.

6. Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

   GRASS GIS is primarily written in C, Python, and C++. It uses a range of geospatial libraries and technologies, including GDAL for data conversion, PROJ for coordinate transformations, and can interface with SQL databases.

Social recommendations and mentions

• Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

  Https://grass.osgeo.org/

      GRASS GIS offers powerful raster, vector, and geospatial processing engines in a single integrated software suite. It includes tools for terrain and ecosystem modeling, hydrology, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It comes with a temporal framework for advanced time series...

  - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago

• What's missing from C# in Godot 4?

  We haven't looked at integrating GRASS yet, as we're more interested in data display, not deep analysis. Just another example of a C/C++ library with front end bindings for Python. Numbers are crunched in C/C++, results returned to Python. Source: 11 months ago

• Discussion Thread

  Anyone have good advice for where to learn how to use GRASS. Source: 11 months ago

• GIS Developer career path

  Outside of personal experience, based on second-hand insight: GRASS is an extremely powerful tool, if you're not familiar with it already, and you can use it from the CLI and from Python. If you'd like to step out of Python at some point, I hear Java is used a lot for enterprise GIS, while Julia looks like the language of the future (especially now with JuliaGeo), but that still remains to be seen. Source: over 1 year ago

• What other tools do you use to help you do GIS?

  Sometimes some modules from GRASS like r.lake at the moment. Source: over 1 year ago

• GIS in R

  Rgass7. Mapsets and examples at https://grass.osgeo.org/. Source: almost 2 years ago

• Linux and GIS?

  Add GRASS https://grass.osgeo.org/ to that list , QGIS was first made for linux ( if I recall correctly). Source: almost 2 years ago

• GIS Computer software.

  Well if you are looking for open source alternatives also check out GRASS GIS (https://grass.osgeo.org/) and other software provided by OSGeo https://www.osgeo.org/projects/. Source: over 2 years ago