GRASS
Research
Group
Introduction
Baylor University is pleased to announce this new home for the public
domain Geographic Resource Analysis Support System (GRASS). GRASS has been
under continual development since 1982 and has involved a large number of
federal US agencies, universities, and private companies. The core
components of GRASS and the management of the integration of the efforts
into GRASS releases were accomplished by the Construction Engineering
Resesarch Laboratory (CERL) in Champaign, Illinois. CERL completed the
last combined release of GRASS as version 4.1 in 1992 and provided updates
and patches to this release through 1995. It has been estimated that
several million dollars of GRASS software development efforts across the
government have been completed since the 4.1 release. Through coordination
with CERL and other GRASS development sites we will be packaging these
powerful new capabilities into a formal 4.2 and 5.0 release in the coming
year.
Plans
We have several goals for the public-domain release of GRASS including:
- We have released GRASS version 4.2. GRASS 4.2 consists
of the GRASS 4.1 engine with the addition of many new programs
that have been submitted by the user community.
- Revamped documentation. In keeping with the tradition of making GRASS
available to the greatest audience possible, are releasing new versions of
the documentation. The current Users,
Programmers, and Installation Guides are currently available in Adobe PDF format.
- The release of version 5.0. Major changes to this version will include
support for floating-point numbers and the separation of 0 and null. This version
of GRASS will also generate DIFFERENT grass format files due to the floating and
null support.
Current Status
As of December, we have released GRASS 4.2 to the public-domain. We are in the
process of finalizing specifications for GRASS 5.0 and working on new Windows 95
based versions of GRASS.
The Future of GRASS
Our main goal is to keep GRASS alive and available to the user community. We hope
that the continued interest in GRASS will result in its further development and
enhancement.
Lead Researchers:
Cleavy McKnight - GRASS Administrative Coordinator
email: cleavy@earthlogic.baylor.edu
Steve Clamons - Lead GRASS Developer (Geology and Remote Sensing)
email: clamons@earthlogic.baylor.edu
Bruce Byars - Lead GRASS Developer (Hydrology and Environmental Applications)
email: byars@labrador.baylor.edu
Raghavan Srinivasan - Blackland GRASS Developer
email: srin@brcsun0.tamu.edu
Jeff Arnold - USDA-ARS (Hydrology)
email: arnold@arssun1.tamu.edu
Scott Cherry - GRASS Documentation and WWW site
email: cherry@labrador.baylor.edu
Contributing Researchers:
Helena Mitasova
Geographic Modeling and Systems Laboratory
Department of Geography
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
email: helena@gis.uiuc.edu
William M. Brown
Geographic Modeling and Systems Laboratory
Department of Geography
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
email: brown@gis.uiuc.edu
Lubos Mitas
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
email: lmitas@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Other cooperating scientists, groups, and agencies
GRASS Research Group
Phone: (254) 710-2361
email: grass@baylor.edu
Address:
GRASS Research Group
Baylor University
P.O. Box 97354 Waco, TX 76798
