Which brings me back to the where this all started, it would be more user-friendly to do searches on passage names as people call them. IE how long is 'Route 66' Currently to do this they would have to know that 'Route 66' was made up of the second half of Diesel Duck plus Onion and the first half of 'hall of time'. The first and last of these is not searchable?
I see your point, but if this degree of user interrogation is required, might it not be better to rationalise the survey, centreline or map objects in the particular dataset than add a new entity to the Therion data model? For example one could choose to use the 'colloquial names' as the survey id or as part of the map object title, and then in concept they could probably be searchable. Maybe a new surveyor discipline is required; always start and stop a survey at the point where the 'name' of a passage changes. In my experience the boundary between particular passage or region names in caves is fuzzy and evolves as the cave is explored and tends to be different for each group of cavers. In any case, as passage is being discovered, it rarely has a name at the time of survey. I think it is reasonable to be able to ask; How long is this centreline? Survey? Map object? And (apart from centrelines maybe) Therion already allows this. I suspect adding another layer of name object is probably unnecessary complication. It comes back to my hobby horse (I think). Data organisation is the key to getting Therion to be flexible and scalable from tiny caves to enormous systems surveyed by every conceivable means etc etc. I suspect the Route 66 question can be answered by judicious planning of the map object structure, and of course this means that every therion cave dataset needs to be carefully organised. I'm not really sure as I still have not completely made friends with maps/previews/offsets/atlases, but I think if I apply myself to it I can come up with a system that is modular and compatible with every type of output. My 2 cents... Other ideas?