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GRASS

is the venerable father of every Open Source GIS. It is under active development and adds its own kind of raster-based analysis to the predominantly vector- and display-oriented GIS world. Lately links have been developed with both
(via the
exchange library), and
. There still is some way to go before this integration is complete, but even the actual functionality is staggering. In my presentation I used GRASS to generate and display the world raster maps. These very large maps (1G uncompressed) have been tiled and resampled using parallel GRASS sessions on the Beowulf cluster, while being displayed at the same time with MapServer.
It would be not too hard to develop a complete user interface for GRASS using the MapClient interface, somewhat along the lines of the current TCL/TK interface. The greatest hurdle for a Web based interface is the fact that GRASS keeps its status information on disk files. Once this has been changed to persistent serverFrame variables, writing a MapClient interface for GRASS would be relatively simple. A very exciting prospect is scheduling mapping operations: creating maps as a succession of intermediate maps, much like the
system.