[GRASS-user] Scientific Comparison between GRASS and Proprietary Remote Sensing/GIS Software

[Jan Hartmann]

Hm, I am just writing a proposal for a large German/Dutch project on 
historical mapping in the Euregio (Maastricht/Aachen/Liège region), in 
the order of €1000000. It will be hosted at SARA Computing Center of the 
University of Amsterdam, with 5 dedicated nodes within a large Linux 
cluster, and completely based on Open Source (MapServer, PostGIS, GDAL 
and PL/R). Until now, I had not thought of GRASS for this project, 
although I have been working with GRASS from the early nineties, as my 
project is essentially directed towards end-users, and as you probably 
know, it is horribly difficult to get this kind of people working with 
GRASS. Things are getting better nowadays with programs like QGis and 
the interactive interface, but it is still a long haul.

Technically and financially, it would be easy to extend the number of 
nodes to allow research on parallellizing Open Source, but I do not have 
the time and knowledge to coordinate it (my main interest and expertise 
is in historical cartography). I have been thinking of contracting the 
main developers of MapServer etc, whom I know reasonably well, to see if 
they could organise something along those lines, e.g. within the OsGEO 
communities.  Again, the problem is not so much finance, but getting 
people who can invest their time and knowledge to formulate specific 
goals, and coordinate and guide the process so as to deliver concrete 
results over a period of (say) three years. This has to be organised in 
some formal way, as it concerns quite a lot of money. Any interest for 
this with the GRASS-developers?

Jan

Dr. J. Hartmann
Department of Geography
University of Amsterdam

Wolf Bergenheim wrote:
> On 09.07.2007 14:57, Jan Hartmann wrote:
>>
>> I would like to add an important aspect I am working on now: cluster
>> computing. There is a big potential in parallellizing algorithms within
>> GRASS, and that would really be unaffordable with commercial
>> GIS-software. A Linux cluster nowadays doesn't cost anything any more,
>> and with free software the possibilities for development are limitless.
> 
> That would make an excellent topic for next year's Google Summer of
> Code. To parallelisize the raster modules to begin with. Thanks for the
> idea :D
> 
> This year we got the most interest in task involving algorithms. I hope
> this would also be a popular subject :)
> 
> --Wolf
>