[GRASSLIST:242] database planning suggestions

[Kirk R. Wythers]

I am looking for suggestions on planning a Grass database. I have a
large number of scanned maps (~500 tiffs, non-georeferenced). They are
from 4 distinct sources in which all 4 source map sets are comprised of
individual township-range maps. Each source set will need to be joined
together in Grass. All 4 sources have a similar extent (although, not
exactly the same). I understand that they need to first be
georeferenced, but once they have been read into a temporary x,y
location for georeferencing, I am considering how to organize them.  My
options, as I understand in my neophyte way are: 

(1) I can read them all into a single location with a "superset" extent
which is large enough to cover all 4 subset extents. Possibly naming an
idividual mapset for each of the 4 sources.

(2) I can read them into 4 distinct locations (1 for each of the 4
sources). In this case each location would have its own extent based on
the total extent of the source maps to be joined. This option would then
probably require only 1 mapset for each location (ie my username)

What are the advantages and/or disadvantages of each of these
approaches? Ultimately all 4 map sources will be used for inter and
intra map comparisons, attributes from each of the 4 sources may be
combined into a 5th meta-map, etc... I think the name of the game at
this point is flexability.

Thanks in advance
-- 
Kirk R. Wythers			Department of Forest Resources	
Tel: 612.625.2261		University of Minnesota
Fax: 612.625.521		1530 Cleveland Ave. N
Email: kwythers at umn.edu		Saint Paul, MN 55108 USA