SRS is fine too. 

Michael Barton
School of Human Evolution &Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Arizona State University

...Sent from my iPad

> On Jun 1, 2018, at 6:28 PM, Nikos Alexandris <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> * Michael Barton <[email protected]> [2018-06-01 22:51:14 +0000]:
> 
>> As one of the most venerable desktop GIS packages and perhaps THE most 
>> venerable still in existence, GRASS has some quirks that harken back to its 
>> origins long ago. Most are simply quirky. But the folder hierarchy called a 
>> “location” is very confusing in today’s GIS world. Originally, it did 
>> primarily refer to maps referencing a geographic location in the world. 
>> Although that meaning still exists in the ‘default region’, GRASS locations 
>> primarily refer to a coordinate reference system (CRS). In fact, while the 
>> CRS of a location cannot be changed (unless you manually alter some of the 
>> files in the directory, at the risk of making maps unuseable), the default 
>> region can be. So a location now refers to a fixed CRS and a changeable 
>> geographic extent.
>> 
>> Use of the anachronistic term “location” to refer to a CRS is a quirk that 
>> makes GRASS more confusing to initial users. I suggest we consider beginning 
>> to migrate the term “location” to “CRS”. The term “location” does not occur 
>> in a large number of module interfaces: those (like g.mapset) for changing 
>> to a new working directory on the fly, vector and raster reprojection 
>> modules, and maybe a couple of others. It occurs in the GUI at startup, in 
>> the location wizard of course, and in some tools for georeferencing.
>> 
>> We could initially maintain backward compatibility and increase 
>> understandability by simply referring to “location” as something like 
>> “location/CRS” where ever it shows up in the GUI, but leave module arguments 
>> alone. A next step would be to have modules that require “location=” as an 
>> argument accept either “location=” or “CRS=”. And maybe that is enough. We 
>> could keep “location” where it currently occurs in existing command modules 
>> and scripts as a legacy option. Likewise, we could keep it in current code, 
>> only changing during code rewrites. Any new modules that need to refer to 
>> this file hierarchy would use “CRS”.
>> 
>> Thoughts?
>> 
>> Michael
> 
> Dear Michael,
> 
> I almost always name Locations after their spatial reference system.
> 
> +1 for this idea.
> 
> Would think of SRS instead of CRS, so as to be in line with GDAL's
> terminology?
> 
> Nikos
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