Comments on: GRASS GIS – Geographic Resources Analysis Support System

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 06:26:30 +0000

That video with William Shatner sold me. Actually I have used GRASS in the past. It has a very impressive heritage. Although I do find it less than intuitive on a number of fronts it’s not that bad once you get the basic concepts. I actually like the clear separation of different projections in that it forces you to be aware of potential issues. Qgis will reproject on the fly, which is great, but sometimes can hide potential problems. Tools from GRASS and SAGA are available inside of Qgis and are often more fully featured and reliable than the native versions. The GRASS tools for correcting and cleaning shapefiles are something I fall back on often. As others have said it’s cartography is not as advanced as some other systems, but it is not alone on that front. It would be beyond my skill set to create an odd on tool for mapping, but surely there are others out there who can find a way. Something like The Atlas mapping tool in QGIS would be fantastic. Has anyone else found a way of using GRASS output into a nicer cartography system, does such a thing exist? Another bonus is that GRASS Will run quite happily on a very lightweight system, including the Raspberry Pi (for a bit less than the $50K dollars mentioned in the video).

By: Stefan B.

Stefan B. — Sun, 09 Jul 2017 10:49:49 +0000

GRASS is your reliable number cruncher

GRASS GIS is incredibly efficient esp. for raster data and extremly reliable.

I strongly recommend watching this video about GRASS: https://vimeo.com/106874424
Which tells you much more about GRASS than I could write in a review here.

As for the review above:
The command line in the background is actually a big plus and also the data management and CRS handling is brilliant, esp. in multi-user environments. Exactly because people otherwise usually have their data “all over the place”, floating around everywhere so things become a real mess and users way to often are unmindful regarding CRS.
Cartography is indeed not the big strength of GRASS (and rather focused on the most important things), but calling it “unsuitable” is unobjective. What is suitable depends on the purpose!
The temporal framework in GRASS should be mentioned as an exceptional standout.

If you are after black boxes which (seemingly) do the thinking for you, GRASS is probably not the GIS of your choice. But if you like control and efficient workflows in analysis I cannot think of any better!

P.S.: I understand that the style of writing in the review is meant to be flippant, but I cannot help it but finding some passages just inept, sorry.

By: Barret

Barret — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 12:56:25 +0000

It’s totally true: long life to GRASS GIS!