[GRASS-user] Organizing locations and mapsets on NFS for teams

[Blumentrath, Stefan]

Hi,

I was wondering if someone knows some well-working solutions for collaborating on locations and mapsets in teams ("best practice")?

Background: In my organization we have some 70 users working in different projects (n~120) (not all use GRASS though), where new data is generated or acquired which might be of wider interest throughout the organisation.

My aim is that data of common interest is shared in a common GRASS database on NFS. Yet the problem is that things might get messy with all project-mapsets, user-mapsets and "PERMANENT"-like mapsets in one location (in the light of the amount of available GIS data, one PERMANENT mapset appears to be no longer sufficient I guess, esp. when also space time datasets are hosted in the GRASS DB).

The solution described here: https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Location_and_Mapsets with common GRASS DB on NFS linked into users home directory is somewhat sexy in order to keep the "user mapsets" out of the common GRASS GIS DB. The drawback however is, that users explicitly have to switch between the two GRASS DBs if they want to share data on NFS, if I understood the consequences correctly. Is someone aware of some nice "one-click- tools" which might be used to sync between home and NFS GRASS DB. Would one need to write a wrapper script around r./v.pack and r./v.unpack for such a job (if not entire (and tidy!) mapsets can be copied) to simplify synchronization for basic users?

In addition, if users generate one mapset for every dataset they might be willing to share, this may lead to way to many mapsets. Furthermore, such mapsets do not end up in the search path automatically as data in PERMANENT would... I was considering to group data as far as  possible into INSPIRE themes / ISO topics (meaning one mapset per topic plus extra mapsets for time series data). But then different users would need to be able to add data in those mapsets meaning modify them (as it would be the case for PERMANENT cause there is not one person handling all data anyway)... Does someone work with a "data janitor user" others may "su" to in order to do general data maintenance?

How do you deal with mapsets for projects where different users collaborate? Do you use project name as a prefix followed by user name or something like this, so that mapsets for a project are grouped? Do you use project user accounts?

I am grateful for any recommendations or info on how others organize locations and mapsets in a collaborative environment...

Cheers
Stefan

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