[GRASS-user] GRASS after ArcInfo

[Graham Watt-Gremm]

Hi Jarek,
After taking my GIS and Geomatics course component early in my  
thesis, I was faced with the choice between walking 200 m to the  
geography department's ESRI/windows lab to complete my thesis  
analyses, or (what I believed to be) the steep learning curve of  
installing and running GRASS in our own department's small lab (all  
Mac's, no money for ESRI licenses + all the other goodies they had in  
geography anyway). I tried to keep going over to geography, but soon  
found that the complicated image analysis and database workflows I  
was using in my thesis were cumbersome and counter-intuitive in  
ArcGIS. At the same time, I was keeping tabs on the GRASS User lists  
and beginning some basic tasks - and once I had my workflow designed,  
it was much easier to implement in the GRASS-postgreSQL-R  
environment, where I kept an edited and commented command history I  
could just run again for each set of images (also my first experience  
with rudimentary scripting - another reason for the migration). When  
I found I needed to fix some problems with my analyses, it was only a  
small task to run the history again for the whole batch - weeks of  
work in arcGIS! While the GUI design efforts were appreciated as I  
learned GRASS, I also found they inhibited my productivity aside from  
certain layer display and querying tasks. When I was stumped I found  
the support and wealth of knowledge in the user list and archives  
always answered my questions. And finally, as one of my committee  
(from Geography!) noted, 'No more black box'. These experiences  
cemented my migration, and I haven't looked back.

Good luck with the course...

Graham Watt-Gremm
Digital Support Specialist
Rocky Mountain Repeat Photography Project
School of Environmental Studies
University of Victoria


On 3-Sep-06, at 11:11 AM, Jarek Jasiewicz wrote:

> Reading disscusion grass nwesgrup I fonud that some people have  
> migrating form ArcInfo to Grass
>
> I'm interesting of reasons of such migration - from expensive (very  
> expensive) commercial program to open source one
>
> I'm not trying to start another disscusion about nothing. I'm  
> (probably like most of as) high school teatcher/scientist and I  
> will try this year to introduce Grass as a part of GIS  course in  
> our University.
>
> I'm not interested in comparing that programs - I did it, and I  
> know differences and limitations of both - I'm interested only of  
> reaseons of migrations
>
> with best regards
> Jarek Jasiewicz
> Adam Mickiewicz University
> Poznań, Poland
>
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