GeoWorld

NEWSLINK GRASS GIS Celebrates 30th Anniversary On July 29, 2013, the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS), a free and open-source GIS for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics and map production, spatial modeling, and 3-D visualization, reached a significant milestone: its 30th birthday, which was celebrated with the release of its latest version, GRASS GIS 6.4.3. Begun at the University of Illinois, GRASS continued its development at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA/CERL) in Champaign, Ill. The GRASS GIS community was established in 1985, with the first annual user meeting and launch of GRASSnet, one of the Internet's early mailing lists. The user community expanded to a larger audience in 1991 with the "Grasshopper" mailing list and introduction of the World Wide Web. In the mid 1990s, development transferred from USA/CERL to The Open GRASS Consortium (a group that would later generalize to become today's Open Geospatial Consortium). The project coordination eventually shifted to an international development team consisting of government and academic researchers and university scientists. A detailed history of GRASS GIS can be found at grass.osgeo.org/history. Recent versions of GRASS GIS come with features such as a modern graphical user interface, a new Python interface to the core C geoprocessing libraries, topological vector support, hundreds The GRASS GIS graphical user interface includes the ability to display shaded terrain maps. 6 G E O W O R L D / S E P T E M B E R 2 O 1 3 of new modules to analyze raster and vector data of all scales and types, support for massive data processing, and a codebase portable to all major operating systems. GRASS GIS currently is developed by a global team of approximately 20 core programmers as well as numerous add-on contributors, testers and translators. Overall, more than 70 core developers have worked on the code in the last 30 years, making more than 50,000 code modifications. GRASS GIS can be used as a standalone application or as a backend for additional software packages such as QGIS and R geostatistics. It's a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and can be freely downloaded at grass. osgeo.org/download/software. SAP Adds Geospatial Functionality to Key Offerings SAP AG, the international maker of enterprise applications for managing businesses and customer relationships, has taken steps to integrate GIS applications more deeply into its offerings. The company announced it would provide end-to-end support for spatial data in upcoming products, via offerings from geospatial solutions provider Esri. SAP offerings to include the new GIS functionality include SAP HANA, SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence Platform and SAP Mobile Platform. The move, according to SAP, should give its customers the ability to add more geographic content to SAP business applications; process spatial, location and enterprise data rapidly; visualize geographic information in maps, graphs and charts; and give field workers applications that process geospatial and business data. "By integrating with the Esri ArcGIS platform across SAP HANA, SAP Business Objects BI platform and SAP Mobile Platform, and by enriching SAP Business Suite applications with spatial content, we want to enable customers to combine the added dimension of location information with enterprise data, in real time," said Steve Lucas, executive vice president and general manager for analytics, database and platform at SAP. "This will give businesses a new level of immediacy in their decision-making capabilities and will increase their competitive advantage."

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