[GRASSLIST:1966] GRASS, SSURGO, and MySQL

[dylan]

Hi everyone,

I have done some work on ESRI based GIS software, and am not completely
satisfied with many aspects of it. Furthermore, I would like to be able to
use a tool that doesn't require budget cuts to purchase and relies on
proprietary file formats. As a big fan of open source software (and linux) ,
GRASS seemed like a great alternative.

I am quite interested in using digital soil survey data (SSURGO via NRCS in
particular) with GRASS, along with doing some of the visualizations in
POV-RAY. I have seen posts in the archive talking about how to get SSURGO
data into a 'location' .... however this involved a lot of spreadsheet work
and manual editing of files. If it is feasible, I would like to create a set
of scripts to import the SSURGO attribute data tables into a MySQL database,
and then access this data from within GRASS to create thematic maps using
the SSURGO spatial data.

is this even possible?

I apologize if this is an overly vague / simple / inappropriate question,
but I am seriously interested in doing this. Partially for my own use, and
also to provide a means for others with limited funding to actively use the
SSURGO / STATSGO data sets.

Thanks in advance,

Dylan Beaudette