[GRASSLIST:5727] Vector-raster bridge software announcement

[Jonathan Greenberg]

We'd like to announce the beta release of "starspan".  Starspan is designed
to bridge the raster and vector worlds of spatial analysis using fast
algorithms for pixel level extraction from point and polygon data.

The main purpose of starspan is to generate databases of pixel values (from
one or a set of raster images) falling within points or polygons, and fusing
them with the database attributes from the vector files.  This allows a user
to do statistical analysis of the pixel vs attribute data in any existing
statistical package (the output of starspan is a CSV file) and can greatly
speed up classification training and testing using many image analysis
packages (e.g. ENVI, Imagine, PCI) by focusing the classification on only
pixels with known attributes, not the entire image.

STARSPAN runs on any Unix/Linux flavor (including MacOs X and Windows via
Cygwin) although it has been only fully tested on Linux and MacOS X.  The
software is completely free.  If you are interested in testing/using the
software, the main website is located at:

http://starspan.casil.ucdavis.edu/

We encourage feature requests and bug reports, and these can be posted on
our gforge website at:

http://casil.ucdavis.edu/projects/starspan/

Sincerely,

Jonathan Greenberg and Carlos Rueda

-- 
Jonathan A. Greenberg, PhD
NRC Research Associate
NASA Ames Research Center
MS 242-4
Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000
650-604-5896
AIM: jgrn307
MSN: jgrn307 at hotmail.com