Abstract:
The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for data management, image processing, graphics production, spatial modeling, and visualization of many types of data. It is free software released under GNU General Public License (GPL). Originally written by the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories (USA-CERL, 1982-1995), a
... branch of the US Army Corp of Engineers, as a tool for land management and environmental planning by the military, GRASS has evolved into a powerful utility with a wide range of applications in many different areas of scientific research. GRASS is currently used in academic and commercial settings around the world, as well as many governmental agencies including NASA, NOAA, USDA, the National Park Service, the U.S. Census Bureau, USGS, and many environmental consulting companies.
GRASS allows users to analyze, store, update, model, and display data quickly and easily. Although it was originally developed for use in land planning, its capabilities have been expanded and used in the fields of engineering, hydrology, geology, physics, statistics, remote sensing, business, and many others.
Due to the rapid growth and popularity of GRASS, the GRASS Development Team has grown into a multi-national team consisting of developers at numerous locations. The development currently underway has resulted in new GRASS versions, the release of new manuals and documentation, as well as continued research and development for new versions.
The GRASS GIS is run through the use of either a standardized command line input, or an Graphical User Interface based on Tcl/Tk. GRASS is also supported under Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista. GRASS can be used in shell scripts which allow users and programmers to create new applications and link GRASS to other software packages. For programming a fully documented C-API (> 800 GIS library functions) is provided. Users can input new data through digitization, CD-ROM, USK key disk, or DVD drive.
[Summary provided by GRASS Development Team] 
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