[GRASS5] joining GRASS development

[Michael Barton]

Benjamin,

This is great that you're interested in bringing your skills and interests
to GRASS development. As you know, I would be very happy to see the new
functions that you'd like to develop. This would make GRASS a preeminent
application for spatial technology in archaeology.

With regard to the extensions menu, Paoli Cavelli (sp?), Lorenzo Moretti, I,
and several others have discussed such a system conceptually. This would be
very nice. Paoli today suggested that R would be a good model to start with
in the way it can download and install a large suite of add-on modules. The
qGIS plugin system is another possible model to look at.

Thanks for helping.
Michael


On 12/10/04 10:15 AM, "Benjamin Ducke" <benducke at compuserve.de> wrote:

> Hello, GRASS developers,
> 
> I would like to join GRASS 5.7 development officially.
> 
> Some of you may know that I wrote some spatial prediction
> modules for GRASS 5.4 and that they are available from
> Michael Barton's GRASS pages.
> 
> my intention as an archaeological researcher is mainly
> to enhance GRASS 5 functionality in a number of fields where
> I think it is still lacking:
> 
> 1. spatial statistics and point pattern analysis:
> - needed for teaching students and basic research
>  (w/o the user having to install and use R)
> - basic signficance and spatial autocorrelation tests
> - advanced voronoi tesselation including weighted voronoi diagrams
> 
> 2. geophysical analysis
> - would love to be able to analyse data from the field in
>  GRASS in a straight-forward way
> - worked on a whitepaper together with Michael Barton and
>  Craig Funkmeister and other contributors,
>  but after the first revision was posted on the GRASS user
>  list, there was no more feedback
> - still think that a geophysical framework would be great for
>  GRASS and would want to keep working on it
> 
> 3. probabilistic analysis
> - extend functionality of predictive modelling tools to vector
>           and site evidence maps
> - create a basic framework for bayesian modelling and inference
> 
> 4. Several smaller things
> - transparent overlay of raster and vector layers
> - misc modules that make things a bit easier for beginners
> 
> 5. GUI things
> - a simple colormap editor
> - a new menu entry "Extensions" in the GIS manager through which
>  packages with distinct functionality (such as predictive modelling)
>  can be installed (using binaries) into the user's current GRASS
>  installation. Such an extension manager should also make it possible
>           to retreive updates over the internet, merge package documentation
>           with the GRASS doc tree, cleanly remove installed packages and
>           provide GUI forms for all modules included in a package.
> 
> These are the things I am currently working on, there are many more smaller
> items
> on my list.
> I feel that to really start with GRASS 5.7 programming, I would need more
> detailed
> information on the current vector engine:
> 
> - where can complete API documentation be found?
> - which parts of the API are stable and which are still in development or
> unimplemented?
> - is there a short text that could get me started with 5.7 vector programming?
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Benjamin
> 

____________________
C. Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
School of Human Evolution and Social Change
PO Box 872402
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ  85287-2402
USA

Phone: 480-965-6262
Fax: 480-965-7671
www: <www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton>