GRASS is currently used around the world in academic and commercial settings as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies. It runs on a variety of popular hardware platforms and is Free open source software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Joining GRASS's well-developed raster engine the GRASS 6 series introduced a new topological 2D/3D vector engine featuring support for vector network analysis and SQL-based DBMS management of linked attributes. This release improves the integration and functionality of the raster and vector engines, and 3D raster (voxel) support has been greatly enhanced.
A new graphical GIS manager and menu system has been implemented, while the old GUI display manager has been retained and improved for legacy support. The NVIZ visualization tool has been enhanced to display 3D vector data and voxel volumes and supports the creation of on-the-fly MPEG animations. Additional improvements include substantial message translation (i18n) with support for FreeType fonts, including multi-byte Asian characters, and tools to allow new project locations to be automatically generated from input data or EPSG code.
This is the first release of GRASS as a proposed founding project of the new Open Source Geospatial Foundation. In support of the movement towards consolidation in the open source geospatial software world, GRASS is tightly integrated with the latest GDAL/OGR libraries. This enables access to an extensive range of raster and vector formats, including OGC-conformal Simple Features. GRASS also makes use of the highly regarded PROJ.4 software library with support for most known map projections and the easy definition of new and rare map projections via custom parameterization. Screenshots
* Screenshots of GRASS 6.1 in action
Platforms supported by GRASS:
GNU/Linux, Mac OS X/Darwin, Microsoft Windows (native using MinGW or with full UNIX support via Cygwin), Sun Solaris (SPARC/Intel), Silicon Graphics Irix, HP-UX, DEC-Alpha, AIX, BSD, iPAQ/Linux and other UNIX compliant platforms. GRASS runs on both 32 and 64 bit systems with large files (>2GB) supported by many key modules. Software download/CDROM:
* http://grass.itc.it
* http://grass.ibiblio.org
* various mirror sites
* GRASS on CDROM/DVD
The new source code is available now, and selected binary distributions for major operating systems will be published shortly.
For details on GRASS software capabilities please refer to: http://grass.itc.it/intro/general.php, the previous GRASS 6.0.0 Announcement, and the newly renovated Wiki collaborative help system."
這是一個new technology preview version of GRASS GIS，為下一個benchmark release（也就是GRASS 6.2了）作準備，我不知道他們項目里的發(fā)布規(guī)則是怎么樣的，所以不好翻譯，暫且理解為“先來一個搶鮮預(yù)覽版，為后面的評測版作準備”。
這個預(yù)覽版增加了數(shù)以百計的新特性，同時還支持最新的GIS數(shù)據(jù)格式。
這也是MapServerFoundation（http://www.mapserverfoundation.org，如今為：http://www.osgeo.org/）里最新的一條消息了，GRASS是美國政府官方支持的一個最大的開源項目，
QUOTE:
Originally developed by the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories (USA-CERL, 1982-1995), a branch of the US Army Corp of Engineers, as a tool for land management and environmental planning by the military, GRASS has evolved into a powerful utility with a wide range of applications in many different areas of scientific research. GRASS is currently used in academic and commercial settings around the world, as well as many governmental agencies including NASA, NOAA, USDA, DLR, CSIRO, the National Park Service, the U.S. Census Bureau, USGS, and many environmental consulting companies.
它也加入了OSGEO組織，算是空間信息產(chǎn)業(yè)大國對開源社區(qū)作的一大貢獻。
說起，OSGEO，當初Autodesk公開其MapGuide源代碼并與MapServer社區(qū)合并的重大舉措似乎歷歷在目，但翻看新聞頁，那已經(jīng)是2005年11月份的事情了，當初國內(nèi)的3S社區(qū)里也引發(fā)了很多人的關(guān)注，為了紀念，我想3SNews的編輯們應(yīng)該將下文翻譯一下并發(fā)表出來：Understanding MapServer Enterprise - a closer look at the latest open source web mapping solution.
http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/7567/28/。
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