Research And Application Of Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS)

Geographic Resources Analysis Support System(GRASS) is used for data management, image processing, graphics production, spatial modelling, and visualization of many types of data. It is Free Software/Open Source released under GNU General Public License (GPL) Originally developed 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 and many environmental consulting companies. GIS is the rudimentary knowledge of GRASS, and Linux operate system is the running environment of GRASS, so this paper also introduces the basic concepts of GIS, including the GIS data organization,model and structure, and analyzes the advantage and the disadvantage of Linux operate system. This paper also expatiates the history,characteristic, advantage, data organization, basic structure and the function of the GRASS. In the end of this paper, an examle of a import from an outer vector map to GRASS is given.