Most people are not really that interested in the intricacies of computer operating systems, so even if Linux OS is a great piece of work, what most of us are interested in is the "killer" Linux application that will inform, entertain or make our life and work easier and more productive. The application that offers this potential for land and natural resource managers is Geographical Information Systems or GIS.
The ability to accurately apply precise geographic coordinates to land and then record the natural and physical features of that place in the world is extremely valuable. GIS technology works hand in hand with the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system. GPS receivers allow precise locations to be recorded and then accurately located again when needed. This technology is already in common use in the military and for large scale urban planning and engineering applications. Our primary interest at humus.com involves GIS applications in agriculture.
Over the next few years it seems likely that GIS/GPS technology will take commercial agriculture by storm. It can probably be compared to the time period when the tractor took over for the mule and horse. Yes, it took a few years, but hardly anyone does it the old way any more.
Like the mechanical revolution this revolution will probably lead to continued consolidation of farmland operations and may not provide any real boost towards food sustainability. One way to help level the playing field is to develop GIS systems for agriculture based on open standards and public domain accessibility. It should also go without saying that it needs to be easy to use.
Currently there is a very powerful public domain GIS called GRASS. GRASS was developed by the Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Laboratory near Champaign Illinois. The acronym stands for Geographic Resource Analysis and Support System. Here is a link to the CERL Grass home page
http://www.cecer.army.mil/grass/GRASS.main.html
The CERL lab still maintains an anonymous FTP server commonly named moon at ftp.cecer.army.mil The Moon has all of the Grass source, binaries and dozens of programs developed by people all over the world to increase the functionality of Grass. There is also a rather moribund Grass news group at info.grass.user
GRASS has been compiled as a binary package for both the A-out and Elf versions of the Linux file system and is freely available on the moon at /pub/grass/grass4.1/release/binary/linux
So we already have a public domain GIS on a public domain operating system. It's a potentially great contribution to a more sustainable future but the package is too complex for the average person to implement.
The CERL lab has discontinued work on developing Grass but the technology is still being developed because CERL has made an agreement with LAS Inc. so that the development of GRASS, and its distribution in a commercial environment is now LAS responsibility. LAS Inc. has used the TCL/TK language to massage GRASS into a potentially more user friendly commercial version called Grassland. They are showing real commitment to keeping open standards for GRASS and Grassland and recently posted on evaluation copies of Grassland in both Win95 & NT versions and for the SUN Solaris 2.4 Unix operating system. A version for Linux is also planned.
For information on Grassland and for downloading the demo versions try this link http://www.cecer.army.mil/grass/LAS
At this point continued work is needed to keep develop simple tools specifically for precision agriculture. At high resolutions the imagery that needs to be used such as ortho photography requires very large files yet the display needs to pan and zoom quickly. One of the strong points of GRASS GIS is its ability to quickly display very large image files and to provide coordinates based on these files. If only some of the basic functionality of Linux Grass could be developed into a relatively easy to use package......
To be continued…..
