GrottoCenter Blog

With the UIS Bbibliography and Informatic commissions and the Belgian associations Speleo J, UBS and the Namur speleology house, we have requested a grant from the UIS Bureau in order to set up tools to automate the exchange of data and files between speleology documentation centers. We have just received a favorable response, the UIS asking for its logo to be on the Grottocenter home page given its repeated support for Grottocenter. Vincent has just set up this logo which allows us to communicate on the solid and long-standing relations between the UIS and the Wikicaves association

The BBS contains many duplicates concerning authors. In order to offer a better service Vincent has developed a service that allows to delete authors or to merge them with another account corresponding to the same author. We now have a set of tools that will simplify the work of moderators

Vincent has just transferred the database from the AWS infrastructure to the Azure infrastructure. This allows us to benefit from a more efficient service with more processors and to better distribute our services on these two infrastructures

Vincent has just released a very important update, but you probably won't see the difference. It is now possible for moderators to delete elements that are attached to entries as well as entries, caves, documents, massifs and organizations. Moderators can also put them back in place, delete them permanently and merge them with a duplicate. Vincent took the opportunity to clean up all the code attached to these entities Thank you very much for this work

You may have noticed some malfunctions in the routing of messages on the mailing lists hosted by the Wikicaves association. Benjamin took charge of the problem quickly, by updating the software, increasing the available memory and refining the parameters. Everything seems to be back to normal

The UIS Informatics Commission has a new presidency and the Wikiaves association is more committed to its action, so that sharing at the international level progresses. If you are interested, do not hesitate to join UISIC https://uisic.uis-speleo.org/

Joerg Dreybrodt contacted us because he wanted to make the data and expedition reports of the Northern Lao - European Cave Project available on Grottocenter. It's now done Thanks for sharing

When you are looking for documents concerning Italy you can find many references on the SSI Speleoteca website https://speleoteca.biblioteche.it/ Numerous article analyzes have been carried out within the framework of the BBS and are accessible on Grottocenter which is linked on the Speleoteca home page

Work is underway to give you access, on an ISU server, to all the symbols defined by the International Speleology Union. Discover the symbols used to describe surface phenomena https://ontology.uis-speleo.org/symbols/

The CDS du Gard has just made available the journals it has published since its creation.   They constitute 4 collections which are accessible in the BBS Spéléogard https://grottocenter.org/ui/ documents/224067 Bulletin du Comité départemental de spéléologie du Gard (CDS 30) https://grottocenter.org/ui/ documents/21660 Bulletin de la Fédération spéléologique du Gard https://grottocenter.org/ui/ documents/21636 Infogard https://grottocenter.org/ui/ documents/224069  

  The Wikicaves association will hold its AGM from April 22 to 28. If you are interested in receiving the emails that will be exchanged during this general meeting, let us know by sending us a message  https://en.wikicaves.org/contact    

    The elements of the “BD Cavités”, a database created by the BRGM, have just been integrated into Grottocenter. Several thousand entries enrich the database “created by cavers for cavers”. Grottocenter has already exceeded 102,000 entrances and cavities.   For various historical reasons, the coordinates of these entries, proposed by the BRGM, are not always very precise. Everyone, in their area of interest, will be able to improve these locations and also complete the encyclopedic sections, as well as the associated documents. Everyone's work will benefit everyone.

  Grottocenter gives you free access to more than 100,000 caves. This is just the beginning, thanks to your commitment this figure is changing every day

  All analyzes carried out for issues 27 to 55 of the BBS were integrated into the BBS on Grottocenter, whenever possible the articles were associated with their journal and their collection.   Vincent has just published a very large work which constitutes version 24.0 of Grottocenter. It was made possible thanks to funding provided by the SSS A first part consists of updating all the libraries used The creation of documents has been moved to the entity creation menu and this is done in a single window without going through different steps The management of details has been improved, for example the link of a document to a massif is done from the massif page The information in the documents page has been reorganized to have a more condensed, more readable whole. The associated license is displayed and it is directly possible to view the image, PDF, sound or video files. An important element concerns the relationship to geographical entities. Previously we associated BBS docu

  https://www.helloasso.com/associations/wikicaves/formulaires/1   Pollution, human activity, data from sensors, topography, photogrammetry, biospeleology: a lot of data is collected on the underground environment. It's time to provide them with a place to save them and make them accessible to the entire community. This is what we are proposing as our objective for 2024. For this we need your help. By collecting €5,000 we will be able to have a student work for 5 months on this subject. With €20,000 we are able to build a complete topographical data processing chain.   Your help will become our common good

  Thanks to the data placed under a free license, the contributions of the partners of the Wikicaves association and the involvement of the contributors to Grottocenter, the number of available caves has just exceeded 80,000. Thank you all  

  As part of the partnership that we signed with the "CDS du Gard", Laurent Blum made data collected by Jean-Louis Galera available to Grottocenter.   A little over 1000 caves, located in Gard and in neighboring departments, have just been added to Grottocenter. Thank you for sharing.   If you also have data that you wish to share, if you are interested in a partnership with the Wikicaves association, contact us