[GRASS5] m.in.e00 status, project

[Eric G. Miller]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 01:10:19PM -0400, Ezra Glenn wrote:
> I am a land use planner in Massachusetts interested in expanding the use of
> GRASS by municipal public planners.  Our state has a very good GIS
> department, but everything is available only in .e00 or ESRI shapefile
> format (see http://www.state.ma.us/mgis/database.htm for examples).
> 
> The burden of having to convert this data to GRASS might prevent people from
> otherwise seeing the exciting potential of this open source resource, so I'd
> like to work with the State to offer a CD with all the layers already
> converted.  
> 
> At present, what is the state of m.in.e00 and other conversion options?
> Should I be using 5.x instead of 4.3?  Please advise.

m.in.e00 seems to be working well whereas a v.in.shape is a little more
troublesome.  Neither have any concept of checking projection/datum
stuff.  One thing to note, is attribute support for vectors in GRASS is
fairly weak.  The infrastructure is coming along with dbmi, but the
system is not as easy to utilize in the vector realm.  Raster support,
is very good (I'm tempted to say it's superior in some ways to ESRI's
offerings ;).  It can be very useful for analyzing slopes, erosion, line
of sight.  I'd be less inclined to use it for maintaining parcel maps,
utilities, etc.  Map making facilities are less than what can be done
with Arc/Info, as well.

Small Inquiry:  If there was a non-profit foundation supporting GRASS
developers (i.e. professional programmers), do you think local
governments would be interested in funding development tasks?  Being
that GIS is somewhat of a niche market, it's fairly difficult to attract
many Free Software developers.  So, I've pondered the idea that a
foundation might make an appropriate conduit whereby public and private
entities could make "donations" or even enter into contracts for
specific work.  When completed, such things would be released as free
software, so the GIS community as a whole could benefit and possibly
even avoid some of the ESRI tax ;).  As it is now, even if someone wants
to make a donation for development work, there is no mechanism.  Just a
thought...

(Note: All comments reference 5.0.  It's mostly usable (some bugs here
and there) but Markus claims it is much better than 4.x.  I can't
compare myself, but I've done some modelling/visualization with GRASS 
that I was unable to do with Arc/Info GRID or ArcView's 3d Analyst/Spatial
Analyst packages.)
-- 
Eric G. Miller <egm2 at jps.net>