On-line cave survey viewer

[Martin Green]

Hi,

I have been putting together a little website for displaying caves
using a javascript map viewer.  (At the moment it uses the google one,
but this is probably not too hard to add support for other javascript
viewers, or perhaps google earth.)  See
http://seagrass.goatchurch.org.uk/~mjg/cgi-bin/map.py

The main aim is to allow clubs with hand drawn surveys, to be easily
displayed on the web at a good quality, rather than hiding away in
attics etc.  If any one has any surveys, that they would like
displayed on the website, then let me know.

It has only been in development for a few weeks, so much of it does
not work and is still up in the air, but hopefully it is possible to
see where it could go.  However there is little point in me nailing
everything down, if people are not going to like the results and thus
not use it.  Behind the scenes it tends to use small XML files, as
well as processing information lazily and in small increments.  This
allows for rapid development and modification of the data.  If you are
interested in how the tiles are generated, which seems to be
non-trivial to get them looking good, and how I attacked the nightmare
of differing coordinate systems, then look for the link in the 'about'
section.

If it is going to work, I guess it needs to be fairly easy to put data
into, else people will be put off.  A possibility is to solely use
information published in wikipedia/wikicommons/wikisource, which
avoids some licensing pitfalls.  This could be done without loading
the wikiprojects servers too much.  However that may not work too well
for clubs how have large repositories of data who may want to use a
script to transfer across data.  Other people may want to just upload
stuff straight to the website itself, if that is the case would
getting them to click a declaration that it is their own survey, and
are happy for me to display it, suffice to avoid too many problems?
Any useful thoughts?

For generalized usefulness, I would like to encourage people to state
the positions and orientations of their caves in a standard way (WGS84
latlng), and make them available under a free a license as possible.
However getting people to transform to WGS84 LatLng themselves would
probably put many people off, as well as loosing the original
information.  So allowing people to setup spatial references on the
website may be an alternative way forwards, but would not be too
useful if combined with the wikiprojects route.

I would add that thanks go to Julian Todd for hosting the site free of charge.

Martin