Development of 3D Cave Information Systems and Cavemapping Tools

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Summary

The project has two main focuses: develop symbol libraries, guidelines and macros to facilitate efficient drawing of cavemaps in popular graphics software, such as Adobe Illustrator; development of web-based cave information systems (CIS) to integrate survey data, 3d visualizations, maps, photographs and text that allow to share the information over the internet.

Currently, cave explorers are undergoing a transition in cave map production from traditional ink drawings towards digitial mapping. Producing digital maps, not only ensures reproduction without quality loss, but also opens new possibilities towards easy production of thematic maps and integration in interactive information systems. This project aims to provide guidelines, symbol libraries and tools to ensure and facilitate the production of high-quality and re-usable digital cave maps.

The web, with it’s possibilities of presenting interactive and multimedial information at a low cost, provides an ideal platform to distribute cave data in an integrated cave information system. Such a system is based on open standards (VRML/X3D (3d), SVG (2d), XML/XHTML (text and additional data)) and should ideally run in any popular webbrowser equipped with the necessary plugins. Clientside ECMAcript provides the logic and communicates with the user interface. Current experiments with the new and promising X3D standard revealed that there are still major limitations regarding browser integration of X3D plugins and rendering performance. Therefore, we currently still rely on VRML as a main format to visualize 3d cave models. Due to the use of plugins, the current prototype only runs within Internet Explorer on the MS Windows platform. We hope to fix that problem with the upcoming support of plugins in alternative web browser platforms. 14)

Project period

01.01.1999 – 31.12.2006

Researchers

Lead: Hurni, Lorenz
Internal: Hohl, Severin. Neumann, Andreas.

Funding source

Own resources of the professorship

Partner

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Web

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Publications

Heller, M., Neumann A. 2001. Inner-Mountain Cartography - From Surveying Towards Information Systems. in: Proceedings of the 20th ICA Conference in Beijing, 2001.

Neumann, A. 2000. Beiträge zur Kartographie und Visualisierung von Karst- und Höhlensystemen. Master thesis at the Department of Geography, Vienna University, http://www.carto.net/neumann/diplomarbeit/.

Neumann, A. 2000. Contributions to Computer-Assisted Cave Mapping and 3D-Visualization of Cave Systems. in: ”High Mountain Cartography” Proceedings of the Second Symposium of the Commission on Mountain Cartography of the International Cartographic Association held at the Alpine Centre Rudolfshütte, Austria from 29 March to 2 April 2000.