GRASS GIS an overview of the applications in 2005

The world of GIS is always in development, and this fact is particularly true for Open Source GIS. Among the GIS software, in the last years GRASS GIS has known wide popularity as it is well documented by the recent GRASS Users conferences, both at national and international levels and the incoming ones. The creativity and fantasy of the researchers together with the freedom of the source code has leaded to the application of GRASS GIS in many different ways, sometimes involving fields like medicine and palaeonthology in which the potential of the software has been used in non conventional manners. This article is an organized overview of a wide amount of applications of this GIS to many different topics and problems, not only in the geographical field. The range of applications goes from environmental modeling to DTM validation, from atmosphere modeling to LIDAR data elaboration, from wildlife management to Avalanche risk assessment, from GPS planning to geomorphologic modeling, from study of human body to modeling the teeth of primates. Because of the Open Source and Free Software development model of GRASS, the development and the applications are entwined, giving each other new momentum. Moreover, because of the current intense development of GRASS it is possible to foresee exciting and entirely new fields of applicability especially for 3D modeling, time series elaboration and Data Base management.