GRASS/OSGeo-News Vol. 4, December 2006 the new Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OS- exciting development for geospatial technologies in Geo). This could provide resources, code, and inspi- general. ration for GRASS development to take place much Thanks for the interview and all the best for your more rapidly than when it was on its own. This is an GRASS engagement! The GRASS Development Team announces GRASS GIS 6.2.0 released 31 Oct 2006 for legacy support. The NVIZ visualization tool has been enhanced to display 3D vector data and voxel We are happy to announce that a new stable version volumes, and now supports the creation of on-the-fly of GRASS GIS has been released today. This release MPEG animations. Further improvements include adds hundreds of new features, support for the latest substantial message translations (i18n) with support GIS data formats, and includes new translations for for FreeType fonts, including multi-byte Asian char- many languages. The Geographic Resources Analy- acters, and the inclusion of tools to create new project sis Support System, commonly referred to as GRASS, locations automatically given a georeferenced data is a Geographic Information System (GIS) combin- file or EPSG code. This is the first release of GRASS ing powerful raster, vector, and geospatial process- as a proposed founding project of the new Open ing engines into a single integrated software suite. Source Geospatial Foundation. In support of the GRASS includes tools for spatial modeling, visual- movement towards consolidation in the open source ization of raster and vector data, management and geospatial software world, GRASS is tightly inte- analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of grated with the latest GDAL/OGR libraries. This en- satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capa- ables access to an extensive range of raster and vector bility to produce sophisticated presentation graph- formats, including OGC-conformal Simple Features. ics and hardcopy maps. GRASS is currently used GRASS also makes use of the highly regarded PROJ.4 around the world in academic and commercial set- software library with support for most known map tings as well as by many governmental agencies and projections and the easy definition of new and rare environmental consulting companies. It runs on a map projections via custom parameterization. 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 intro- Platforms supported by GRASS duced a new topological 2D/3D vector engine fea- turing support for vector network analysis and SQL- based DBMS management of linked attributes. This GNU/Linux, Mac OS X/Darwin, Microsoft Win- new release improves the integration and function- dows (native using MinGW or with full UNIX sup- ality of the raster and vector engines, and greatly en- port via Cygwin), Sun Solaris (SPARC/Intel), Sili- hances 3D raster volume (voxel) support. Addition- con Graphics Irix, HP-UX, DEC-Alpha, AIX, BSD, ally, this release debuts a new graphical GIS man- iPAQ/Linux and other UNIX compliant platforms. ager and menu system, while an improved version GRASS runs on both 32 and 64 bit systems with large of the old GUI display manager has been retained files (>2GB) supported by many key modules. ISSN 1614-8746 29 GRASS/OSGeo-News Vol. 4, December 2006 Software download/CDROM – Display: Movement toward X-Windows as an optional dependency (new multi- • http://grass.itc.it platform GUI support) • http://grass.ibiblio.org – Display: High CPU use during interactive mouse functions fixed • numerous mirror sites – Projection code database: updated to • GRASS on CDROM/DVD EPSG 6.11.2 – Tcl/Tk 8.4 support for Debian and other The new source code is available now and binary platforms using threaded libraries packages for major operating systems will be pub- lished shortly. – Full FFTW3 support for fast Fourier trans- For details on GRASS software capabilities please forms refer to: http://grass.itc.it/intro/general. – NetBSD configuration fixes php, the previous GRASS 6.0.0 Announcement, and • the newly renovated Wiki collaborative help system. New quality control systems: – New internal GRASS test suite (scripts What’s new in GRASS 6.2.0 collection in "testsuite/") – New external GRASS test suite (TU (selected improvements) Berlin) • Numerous bug fixes – New external GRASS Quality Assessment and monitoring system (École Polytech- – see the ChangeLogs (6.1, 6.2) for details nique de Montréal and ITC-irst) • Source code quality/libraries: – CVS-commit reports into IRC ’#grass’ channel via CIA - The open source infor- – The GRASS code base is now in large part mant ANSI C compliant • Graphical User Interface (GUI): – Ported natively to MS-Windows (MinGW based) – All modules: Major improvements in the – Source code header files: improved, many auto-generated GUIs compiler warnings fixed – gis.m: NEW - GIS manager added as a re- – Compilation: compatible with GCC 4.x placement for d.m (optional) – Programmer’s Manual: continued Doxy- – d.m: Legacy support provides access to gen integration and automated generation the latest features while preserving code into PDF and HTML formats. Publicly maturity available for download and perusal. – QGIS integration: fixes for the GRASS plugin and toolbox available from Quan- – Improved policies for code submission tum GIS specified in the SUBMITTING files – Continued behind-the-scenes infrastruc- – GRASS-SWIG prototype interface added ture refinements for the next generation (library bindings for Perl and Python) GUI – DBMI: SQLite driver added; SQL parser extended (support for expressions, new • GRASS Extensions Manager (GEM): NEW types, etc.) – Configure, compile and install additional – DBMI: MySql driver rewritten; MeSql GRASS modules without needing the added GRASS source code. Simplifies the addi- – Support for long map/mapset names tion of new modules or themed module groups. – Raster maps: ZLIB compression bug fixed for tiny maps • Modules/Scripts: – Raster maps: optional large file support – Message translation (i18N): added and ex- (LFS, experimental) for maps > 2GB tended to more than a dozen languages, – Display: X11/PNG driver rewritten, Tcl/Tk GUI and shell script messages are added RGB-raster operations now translatable ISSN 1614-8746 30 GRASS/OSGeo-News Vol. 4, December 2006 – Documentation/man pages: various – i.in.spotvgt: NEW - import SPOT-VGT fixes and improvements (more exam- NDVI satellite imagery into a raster map ples added, including graphics, improved – i.landsat.rgb: NEW - auto-enhancement style, new introductory pages) of colors for LANDSAT imagery – Raster modules: improved support for – i.ortho.photo, i.rectify: no longer signal meta-data and map history completion with email notification – d.correlate: NEW - create a graph of the – i.spectral: fix for finding gnuplot correlation between data layers – i.points, i.vpoints: various fixes, includ- – d.graph: rewritten and extended, merged ing reverse transform overlay of vector with d.mapgraph; support for symbols maps from the target projection – d.grid: added support for geographic grid – m.proj: NEW - utility to convert coordi- overlay on non lat/lon map projections nates from one projection to another (au- and display of coordinate values tomated frontend for cs2cs) – d.labels, v.label: d.paint.labels renamed – NVIZ: integrated into single user inter- d.labels; significant fixes and improve- face; animation labels; new fly-through ments to the label subsystem navigation; direct output of animations to MPEG with FFMPEG library; menus pol- – d.m: improved layout; added functional- ished; full Tcl/Tk 8.4 support ity – ps.map: many improvements (extended – d.menu: NEW - creates and displays a RGB support, etc), new vector fill patterns menu within the active graphics moni- including vector legend support tor (tool for interactive scripts) (port from GRASS 5) – r.carve: NEW - hydrologic module for transforming vector stream data into a – d.mvmon: NEW - moves displayed maps raster map, including the subtraction of to another monitor stream depth from the output DEM – d.out.file: NEW - saves active dis- – r.flow: block erroneous Lat/Lon calcula- play monitor graphics to an image file tions (PNG,JPEG,...) – r.in.srtm: support for US 1-arcsec tiles – d.out.gpsdrive : NEW - exports display – r.in.wms: NEW - download and import monitor to a GpsDrive compatible back- data from WMS servers drop image – r.in.xyz: NEW - creates a raster map – d.polar: NEW - draws a polar diagram for from an assemblage of many coordinates an angle map such as topographic aspect using univariate statistics (LIDAR/Swath or flow direction bathymetry import tool) – d.rast.arrow: many enhancements, sup- – r.lake: NEW - raises lakes in a DEM from port for magnitude as well as 360 degree a seed at a given water level directional inputs – r.le: many stability fixes – d.text: added support for text rotation – r.mapcalc, r3.mapcalc: acos(), asin(), – d.vect: variable vector line width added, pow(), &&& and ||| added for more in- random colors for points and lines, dy- tuitive handling of null data namic width and colors from attribute – r.mask: NEW - create a MASK for limiting data raster operations (port from GRASS 5) – d.vect.thematic: NEW - customizable the- – r.out.gdal: added support for multiple matic mapper for vector map displays CREATEKEY and METAKEY parameters – g.html2man: fixes for improved man – r.out.vtk: NEW - converts raster maps