[GRASSLIST:2702] Re: Tutorial

[Eric G. Miller]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2001 10:33:12 -0800
brianknaus at juno.com wrote:

> I am also a "newbie" to GRASS.  I also have picked up tutorials such as
> the "grass_seeds" with success and then foundered when I wanted to learn
> more with a project of relevance to my own work.  The GRASS filesystem is
> relatively confusing for someone new to it.  One of the main reasons that
> products like "ArcView" are so successful is because people provide data
> for it in its native format.
> 
> I would be interested if there is a tutorial on importing data into the
> correct format and place within the GRASS filesystem (the use of the SDTS
> datasets would be of particular use to those of us in the USA).

v.in.sdts works pretty well.  There's also m.sdts.read for querying info
about sdts files like the data quality, lineage, etc...  r.in.gdal supports
SDTS DEM's.

GRASS has a more organized approach to data management than ArcView which
shoves more of the data organization onto the user.  It's pretty straight
forward if you just consider:

   GISDBASE = some directory where you'll be creating/storing GRASS
              projects.
   LOCATION = Some geographic extent of interest that contains
              data sets that [should] all be in the same coordinate system.
              Every location has a PERMANENT directory which stores some
              basic information about the whole location, and is a good
              place to park base files.  You can think of a location as
              a data library for a region of interest.
   MAPSET   = You can organize these thematically or geographically or
              by project or whatever.  Whichever mapset you choose at
              start-up is the editable set of data for that session (you
              can reference other mapset data, you just can't change it).

-- 
Eric G. Miller <egm2 at jps.net>