Data sharing and visualisation

[Andrew Brooks]

Hello

Some elementary questions from a new member!

1. The BCRA Sig web page looks rather outdated so I'm not sure if there's any activity these days... Is this the right place to ask?!

2. Is there now a "standard" file format for cave survey data?  The latest buzzword these days is XML so I presume someone's come up with a schema. (Yes, I know the saying which begins "The nice things about standards is...")

3. Is there a unique repository for cave survey data, where people could go for data on "most" caves, or do surveyors still keep their own stuff secret?

4. Has anyone considered visualisation in more common software?  Obviously something like Survex is the most cave-specific, but next would be a 3-D program, the most generic being something like a VRML plugin in a web browser.

But I've thought of something I would like to have even more: cave survey data in a format suitable for Google Earth.  One way to do it very simply would be a KML file where the passages were elevated above the ground. That would let you see where the passages go in relation to the above-ground satellite images, and would let you see the cave in 3-D. (I've seen this done for aircraft tracks so I assume it's possible to represent cave passages in a similar way).

I don't know anything about the file format for designing your own 3-D buildings to plug into Google Earth (SketchUp files?) but maybe they could be used for representing the actual cave (chambers etc.) rather than just centre-lines.

I think it would be great if there was a repository where people could go to get all the South Wales caves (for example) in one place, and in an easily usable file format like this.  I'd love to see Draenen and Easegill, for example, overlaid on Google Earth...

Andrew