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Today, Free and Open Source Software has become synonymous with innovation and progress. Free use, modification, and distribution of programs and their source code guarantee due the free exchange of ideas between users and developers and owing to appropriate licensing. GRASS (the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, http://grass.itc.it) is a free and open source GIS (Geographic Information System) software package, integrated with image processing and data visualization subsystems. It provides many modules for raster and vector data manipulation, rendering images on screen or on paper, multispectral image geocoding and processing, point data management and general data management. GRASS provides interfaces to PostgreSQL, MySQL, DBF, and ODBC-connected databases. Further, it can be connected to UMN/Mapserver, R-stats, gstat, Matlab, Octave, Povray and other software packages.
This tutorial gives a compact introduction to GRASS 6. We intend to illustrate basic functionality of the program. For more insight into the software capabilities, see the references listed in the bibliography. The datasets used in the workshop and also this document are available from http://mpa.itc.it/markus/mum3/.