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GRASS GIS releases version 6.2.3

27 November 2007
https://grass.osgeo.org

The development team is happy to announce that a new bugfix version of GRASS GIS has been released today. This release fixes a number of bugs discovered in the 6.2.2 source code. It is primarily for stability purposes and adds minimal new features. Besides bug fixes it also includes a number of new message translations and updates for the help pages and projection database.

Highlights include further maturation of the GRASS 6 GUI, vector, and database code. Some improvements have been backported from the GRASS 6.3 development branch where new development continues at a strong pace of approximately one code commit every hour, including major work on an all new cross-platform wxPython GUI and a native MS Windows port (from 6.3.0 onwards).

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, commonly referred to as GRASS, is a Geographic Information System (GIS) combining powerful raster, vector, remote sensing and and geospatial processing engines into a single integrated software suite. GRASS includes tools for spatial modeling, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated 4D presentation graphics and hardcopy maps.

GRASS is currently used around the world in academic and commercial settings as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies. It runs on a variety of popular hardware platforms and is Free open-source software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

GRASS is a proposed founding project of the new Open Source Geospatial Foundation. In support of the movement towards consolidation in the open source geospatial software world, GRASS is tightly integrated with the latest GDAL/OGR libraries. This enables access to an extensive range of raster and vector formats, including OGC-conformal Simple Features. GRASS also makes use of the highly regarded PROJ.4 software library with support for most known map projections and the easy definition of new and rare map projections via custom parameterization. Strong links are maintained with the QuantumGIS and R Statistics projects with integrated GRASS toolkits available for both.

Software download at https://grass.osgeo.org/download/ and numerous
mirror sites.

Full story at https://grass.osgeo.org/announces/announce_grass623.html

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New GRASS Book published: Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach

The new edition of Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach is now available! With this third edition, we enter the new era of GRASS 6, the first release that includes substantial new code developed by the International GRASS Development Team. The dramatic growth in open source software libraries has made GRASS 6 development more efficient, and has enhanced GRASS interoperability with a wide range of open source and proprietary geospatial tools. The book is based on GRASS 6.3.

Thoroughly updated with material related to GRASS6, the third edition includes new sections on attribute database management and SQL support, vector networks analysis, lidar data processing and new graphical user interfaces. All chapters are updated with numerous practical examples using the first release of a comprehensive, state-of-the-art geospatial data set. This new OSGeo Educational data set along with additional material can be downloaded from https://www.grassbook.org/

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First release candidate of GRASS 6.3.0 now available

A first release candidate of GRASS 6.3.0 is now available:

https://grass.itc.it/grass63/source/
-> grass-6.3.0RC1.tar.gz

An initial announcement has been drafted at
https://grass.itc.it/announces/announce_grass630.html
(state April 2007, further fixes need to be merged in)

Key fixes include improved portability for MS-Windows
(native support), hundreds of fixes, TclTk based
portable graphical interface and much new functionality.

Release candidate management at
https://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/GRASS_6.3_Feature_Plan

Please test, test, test…

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OSGeo Celebrates 1st Anniversary

Tyler Mitchell, OSGeo’s Executive Director, illustrates in a recent posting the many highlights from the first year of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. Read more at https://www.osgeo.org/tyler/

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First combined GRASS-News / OSGeo-News volume published

The GRASS-News editors and OSGeo Promotion and Visibility Committee announce the first combined GRASS-News / OSGeo-News volume. You can find the full pdf (5.3 MB) as well as PDFs of individual articles on the GRASS webpage:
https://grass.itc.it/newsletter/index.php
or directly via:
https://www.osgeo.org/content/news/news_archive/GRASS_OSGeo_News_vol4.pdf

A first edition of OSGeo-News will be published in 2007 with interesting articles covering various topics of OpenSource projects. Please visit https://www.osgeo.org in the next couple of weeks to find more detailed information how to submit articles.

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OSGeo.org Hires an Executive Director

Frank Warmerdam, president of OSGeo.org announces that OSGeo has succeeded in hiring Tyler Mitchell as a full time executive director from November 2006 onwards. The full press release gives some background. There have been lengthy discussions if an Executive Director is needed and desired for a community driven foundation, but in the end it was decided that a hired “Ed” is essential as driving force – to get stuff done. Tyler will give organizational support for the quickly growing OSGeo community and act as “to-go” person and contact point. The idea is to give support to the various committees and act as shortcut between the various subcommunities as constituted by the OSGeo software, education and public geodata projects. Of course he will also play a major role in promoting the ideas and concepts of OSGeo around the globe. A detailed job description was prepared and approved by the board based on further reflections.

Welcome, Tyler!

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FOSS4G conference series growth

The recent FOSS4G2006 conference at Lausanne, Switzerland was a great success. It was amazing to see how many people showed up and how many creative ideas they presented there. From Jody’s blog I took some of the next figures, but obviously the conference merge of this year had a longer story. The Lausanne conference was a come together of MUM, GRASS, EOGEO, Java and more folks with their various community conferences. Here a more complete version:

2002 150 people GRASS Users conference, Trento, Italy (Proceedings)
2003 90 people MapServer User Meeting, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (Proceedings?)
2004 150+ people FOSS4G: GRASS Users Conference, Bangkok, Thailand (Proceedings)
2004 200+ people MapServer User Meeting and Open Source GIS Conference, Ottawa, Canada (Proceedings)
2005 300+ people MUM3 – Open Source Geospatial Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (Proceedings)
2006 500+ people Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland (Proceedings)

2007 you ask? We’ll see, OSGeo.org will publish the call for hosting the conference soon. Some ideas are already floating around. Having 500+ people is nice, maybe we should not aim at 1000+ …

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