From: Paul & Eleanor (goodhill_at_xmission.com)
Date: Mon Feb 12 2001 - 07:39:10 CET
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Andreas Neumann wrote:
> At least a few hundreds up to several thousand kilometers of cave
> passages are mapped and analyzed by using Toporobot - so it doesn´t seem
> to be an impossible method. At least within Switzerland and other European
> countries it allowed us to integrate different data.
Dear Andreas,
Thanks for jumping in to the discussion.
I certainly wasn't trying to suggest that toporobot could NOT be used,
or that you couldn't tell the surveys what to collect, just that
in the world I have experienced there are more cavers and surveyors
and ofter several data processors, so I am never in a situation
where I could tell anyone what to collect and how to collect it.
The cavers are generating data before the even know what people
are going to do with it. Generally the style of data collection
is in whatever style the cave surverors are used to, which is
generally a regular 'North American' style with minor variations
which are not hard to understand.
As maybe an extreme example. Gary P (who is on this list) came
along after many kilometers of Lecheguilla cave already were
created and processed (Gary, please correct me if my
facts are wrong). The world doesn't exist where he could have said
"Oh wait, let's got back and organize the names of survey stations, such
that there will be some more useful information." He had to
create software to deal with what was there, not limit himself
to working with more data, if and when he had it.
> At least a Toporobot
> series is much more precisely defined than a survey - even within this
> list there seems to be uncertainty on what a survey exactly is.
Around these parts we have to figure out what a series is from the data.
Yes, 'survey' has it different meanings, hopefully that will suggest
people stay away from that particular construct, or reduce it role to
that of a name of some data. One of the reasons for
this is that this is an international group. There is no particular
reason to define what a "survey" is, most people want to find points
and shots and how they connect together. "Survey" is an independent
grouping of points that is more of historical interest or happens to
apply a set of shared attributes to some data. How this grouping is
done varies from one set of users to the next.
Americans are generally for something akin to free-market forces. Few
consider trying to centrally plan a method or format and expect
everyone to adopt it because someone told them to. If they do they
soon realize it is impossible to accomplish across the whole
continent. The only way you'll get lots of people on lots of
continents to use any technique, be it toporobot station names,
or caveXML, is by making it useful to more people. Telling folks
they can not give you data unless they name their stations a
certain way is a sure way to limit yourself to only those people
who have this style of data and certainly excludes any historical
data, which in this case would include anything from before
the day the standard was established. In this country that would
definitely exclude 1000s of kilometers of cave passage.
By the way, can you provide a URL or a description of the toporobot
naming scheme, so others have something to consider. I'm sure it
would be instructive to some folks who have never seem it.
Yourself and Martin might be the folks to go to get data processed
in your part of the world, so you have the luxury of telling
folks what to do differently, but no one person and their needs
and their softwares ablities will ever be in that situation for
the whole world.
Any impossibilties arise from my social, political, organizational,
historical context not from any technical merits of the toporobot
and it formats.
-Paul
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