[GRASS-dev] [SoC] Improve multicriteria analysis tools

[Jean-Denis Giguere]

Greetings!


My name is Jean-Denis Giguère. I will finish in early May my master
thesis in Geographic Sciences. While finishing my thesis, I'm teaching
an introductory course in GIS at Université de Sherbrooke. I give my
course using several open source software. Grass + Qgis play a major
role in that stack.

Google Summer of Code offer me a very interesting opportunity to
contribute back to the GRASS community. I have basic skills in
programming. Although I'm more a GIS analyst than a programmer, I
already succeed to produce substantial codes for production use for
another open source project. My master thesis is about evaluation of
an atmospheric simulation model related to light pollution. I'm really
interested by software development processes from initial
specification phase to deployment, including continuous QA activities,
documentation, etc.

Maybe because I study and teach in a "Applied Geomatic" department,
decision making is a critical concern for me. GRASS offers a wonderful
toolbox for many geospatial analysis. I think improvement of decision
making tools will make GRASS even more powerful for many users.

There is already an add-on for multicriteria decision analysis [1].
This add-on is a very interesting start, but I think we should offer
more options. Firstly, I think MCDA tools are as important for vector
analysis than for raster. The mcda plugin works only with raster data.
Also, there are many interesting combination rules.  I think we could
add at least one other combination rule that would be useful for
scenario evaluation.

My reflexion is in a early stage, but I would be very glad to improve
and document it. I would like to know is there is an interest in the
community  for this kind contribution. I'm interested by both your
user and dev perspectives.
Also, I'm willing to consider other GRASS projects for SOC. If they
could be related to decision making, it would be nice, but it's not a
condito sine qua non.

Best regards,

Jean-Denis

cci. Gianluca Massei. Author of mcda add-on

[1] http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_AddOns#mcda