Activities of GRASS in Thailand.pdf

Proceedings of the Open source GIS - GRASS users conference 2002 - Trento, Italy, 11-13 September 2002 Activities of GRASS in Thailand Monsak Socharoentum GIS and Spatial Database Section, National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, National Science and Technology Development Agency, 112 Pahonyothin Road, Klong 1 , Klong Luang , Pathumthani 12120 Thailand Tel 0-2564-6900 Fax 0-2564-6901-5 ext.2271, e-mail monsak@hpcc.nectec.or.th Abstract GRASS has been initially promoted since 1998 by NECTEC (National Electronic and Computer Technology Center) in Thailand. The first activity is setting up a GRASS mirror site and follow by joining in GRASS development team. Even though these activities are initiated, the user-friendly problem in Linux and GRASS is a big obstruction for user’s starting. Therefore, NECTEC tried to extend GRASS community in Thailand by launching a few projects such as short-course training, free program distribution as CD-ROM, improvement the mirror site, and advertising its capabilities through universities. It was found that these projects helped to increase the number of GRASS users up to 40 users, who came from various occupations, mostly from government offices. Even this number was too small, trend of GRASS interest was gradually increased according to further requests. Apart from these activities, web based GIS with respect to GRASS was also developed and implemented here. It was found that this web gave more comfortable for querying. Three projects have been implemented by using this technology. Nowadays, NECTEC develops some tools supporting for Thai’s users; for example Thai label for map composition, Thai installation guide, and Thai Installation package based Linux TLE shown in GUI style. All of these are being developed for Thai users. 1 Introduction Currently GIS is an important technology for Thailand particularly for environmental applications. There are many GIS’s softwares ava