Dear GRASSers:
This is a note for all beginners who haven't yet reached the realms of GRASS
mastery.
I stepped into an article by Kurt FEDRA and Milan KUBAT from Austrian IIASA
that is as knowledgable as enthusiastic about GRASS. The publication is called
EARSeL Advances in Remote Sensing, Vol 1, #3, July 1992. In their 11 pages,
FEDRA et al give a near perfect introduction to GRASS, an overview to the sys-
tem aspect of this software that I have encountered nowhere else. Although they
seem to work with version 3.0, there seems nothing to be outdated.
On top of GRASS they built an Application Interface Toolkit that those people
working with XGRASS should consider as an alternative (I don't know anything
about it's availability to the public, though). Applications include decision
support systems, simulation and optimization models and expert systems.
My only (minor) criticism about this article is the authors' use of the term
hybrid system while referring to GRASS. Every raster-oriented GIS, nowadays,
includes the possibilty to digitize some arcs, vectors, you name it, and then
either rasterize them or put them into another screen layer.
By the way, I am sorry that I have never seen K. FEDRA on this list. He cer-
tainly would be an help in answering questions that now keep clogging the list.
You people at CERL: take this publication with you, the next time you ask for a
raise of salary. If GRASS would be an commercial product, the company would
have to pay me well to write such a PR review.
I hope, I haven't carried owls to Athens, by pointing to this article, but I
don't remember to have seen any refernce to it before.
Jochen Albrecht