[GRASSLIST:3415] RE: GRASS in education advice.

[Beaudry Charles (NORANDA)]

Ivan wrote:

> I am relatively new to GIS and would like to get as much advice on how
> competitive GRASS is when compared with the major GIS players in the 
> market. 
> 
> My main interest is how easy and useful GRASS can be for teaching
> purpose.  If anybody running GRASS as a main 
> teaching/research platform
> could you please share your experience and thoughts.
> 
> Our main teaching/research areas: marine geology and geophysics,
> structural geology, coastal hydrology and geomorphology; 
> human geography,
> soil geography.

Grass is best suited for an environment where programming literacy is high.
The flexibility of the programming environment is not matched, in my view,
by any other system whether open source or proprietary.  However this
strength may not be an advantage for people who are mainly going to use the
system in specific applications.  For the pure GIS paradigm in terms of
database and spatial data structures a Brazilian system called "Spring" has
a lot of merit.  Unfortunately Spring is only available in binary format,
for Linux and Windows, but the latter version is fairly stable and can read
MSAccess and Dbase files.

   Also Grass is best at grid manipulation whereas its vector module is less
flexible and in the process of being re-designed.  

Charles Beaudry
Toronto, Canada

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