We are planning on expanding our GIS lab, which currently has only PC. We
run PC Arc/Info, Idrisi, EPPl7 and OSU Map. I would like to move up to the
Unix environment. We have not settled on the software that we will use, but
I am leaning towards Arc/Info and GRASS. Arc/Info of course is expensive
and GRASS is not. We have not selected the platform to run the GIS on, but
one possiblity is Sun workstations. I would appreciate it if any of you
would provide me with a summary of the capabilities of GRASS. Also if there
are those of you who have used both GRASS and Arc/Info version 6, I would
like to see of comparison of the two. I know that Arc/Info does both raster
and vector GIS. If I am correct GRASS is a raster GIS but it has the
capability of draping vector file over raster data layers.This software will be used in a primarily undergraduate lab. How
user-friendly is GRASS? How compatible is GRASS output with other GIS? Does
it support a wide variety of input and output devices? What are its
capabilities in terms of map design? Does the fact that it is raster based
result in reduced quality of character representation, such as in annotation
and titles? How flexible is it in accepting and converting files with other
formats and data structures? What kind of a database structure is available
with GRASS? How do the database management capabilities compare with those
of a relational database managment program?Any information that you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
Regards
Larry Lewis BITNET: mfltl@ecnuxa.bitnet
Geography Department INTERNET: mfltl@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu
Western Illinois University
Macomb, IL 61455
Tel (309) 298-1764
(309) 298-1648