[Therion] Vercors 2008

Martin Green martin.speleo at googlemail.com
Mon Feb 26 19:49:12 CET 2007


On 2/26/07, thierrygonon <thierrygonon at mac.com> wrote:
> OK, I agree with all current comments. I didn't know your project
> before, Julian ! It's quite nice and working well. May be one thing I
> can point out is that the datas stored about caves are not many... You
> only have coordinates ?

At the moment, the entrance data is mostly automatically created from
survex files, hence the lack of any detailed information.  There is
more information about the cave entrances of the loser plateau, held
in a giant CSV file.  I will get around to parsing it at some point
and will provide something more useful, along with links to the
relevant webpages.  I was thinking the parsing of the CSV file should
happen on the loser plateau server, and then send the requests via CGI
to make the markers to the cave database server.

> I think that maybe we can add other levels of
> information, for people who want to add them.

I would definitely like to see more information attached to each of
the markers.  At the moment an XML file on the server, can specify the
WGS84 longitude, latitude, min and max zoom levels, the infobox html
and the mouse hover text.

Generalization such that any spatial reference system could be used
rather than WGS84 longitude and latitude will probably be on the cards
in the near future.

I suspect there is a lot of information about caves in structured
electronic formats, so it makes sense to try to reuse this information
if possible rather than starting again.  (With links back to the
actual sources of information.)

Possibly some of the entrances should be hand editable by anyone,
whilst others are generated by scripts on other cavers servers.
Julian is also looking into a way of putting such information onto
wikipedia/wikisoure/wikicommons, and then having the survey viewer
scrape off the information it wants.  The risk might them be that the
automatic scripts start overwriting peoples hand edited work.  To
prevent this there should probably be some way of locking the details
of an entrance, to manual or automatic editing.

Whether more structure is desirable needs to be considered.  For
example cave length and depth fields could be used to automatically
display a selection of the most important caves.  Whether it would be
possible to have some sort of standard layout for the info box, I am
not quite sure...

Let me know if you have any ideas about how it should work.  Or if you
want to poke around the inside of the site to see how rough and ready
my code is, ask Julian for a login to his server.

I hope this post is not too off topic.

Cheers,
Martin



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