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Showing posts from June, 2026

All the secrets of the search engine revealed

Chloé has just produced and published a video showing you how to use all the features of the Grottocenter search engine. You'll learn everything in just 5 minutes—kudos on a fantastic job!

Grottocenter in Underground Vision #2

Ferdinando is responsible for publishing a very comprehensive article about the Wikicaves association and the recent developments of Grottocenter in the June issue of Underground Vision magazine. This is a way to raise awareness of the project and to keep track of its progress in 2026. https://speleomedit.tetide.org/magazine/published-numbers/june-2026-n2/

Sensor Data on Grottocenter

Intense work took place last night; Clément and Paul worked tirelessly, and this morning you can use the feature that allows you to import sensor data. This is a very important feature that required a tremendous amount of work. But it allows us to offer a service that is both essential for studying caves and currently unavailable as free, open-source software, freely usable online, enabling all processing, long-term data archiving, and making it available to anyone who needs it. Congratulations and thank you, Clément, for this excellent achievement!

Grottocenter, always ahead of the curve

To meet a need expressed by the prospecting team working in the Montpellier area and by the French Cave Rescue Service (Spéléo Secours Français), you can now download your search results for cave entrances in CSV, GPX, KML, and GeoJSON formats. Less visible but very important: Clément has also updated the search engine indexes so that the results provided better match your expectations. The result may look the same, but you get it much faster.

Who contributes to Grottocenter?

To find out, each page includes a link to the revision history page. Paul has just updated these pages to make them more readable and perfectly organized. It's now very easy to attribute each contributor's role in the collaborative work.

Map search using coordinates

To address a need expressed by Bastien, who is part of the team improving cave information, Paul has released a new feature on the map. You can now enter coordinates and view the corresponding point. Here are the coordinate systems you can use and examples for testing: WGS84 decimal: 45.1179, 5.4786 Decimal with cardinal/degree symbol: 45.1179° N, 5.4786° E DMS: 45° 7' 4.6" N, 5° 28' 43" E DDM: N 45° 07.066 E 005° 28.717 Lambert 93 (EPSG:2154): 843000, 6450000 (X/Y order or inverted) Lambert III cartography (EPSG:27573): 722000, 3165000 (X/Y order or inverted)

Easier to use Grottocenter in the field

We want to make Grottocenter easier to use in the field. With this in mind, Paul has just implemented two very practical features: Now, when you create or edit an entry, you can view the map in full screen and pinpoint your location (if GPS is enabled). Try this new feature out in the field!

The documents look great on Grottocenter!

Thank you, Paul, for this new feature. Now the documents are presented perfectly, well-organized, and clearly. The result is impressive for every type of document: Photos/Images Collections Journals Articles Videos Audio Files

Data quality is displayed.

Grottocenter easily accessible. Thanks to recent work by Paul, you can access this information on the map and filter caves according to this criterion. It's your turn: help us improve the quality of the information by sharing the data you have.

Revolution on Grottocenter

A revolution has just taken place on Grottocenter thanks to the work done by Zouhair. Grottocenter now allows you to chat with other registered users: this feature gives you the opportunity to connect with other contributors and thus get up-to-date information or information that is not publicly available about caves. You can also receive email notifications when a message is sent to you: an easily configurable tool to manage your conversations. What do you think of this new service?