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