CUCC Expedition Handbook

Troggle - the users

Troggle runs much of the the cave survey data management, presents the data on the website and manages the Expo Handbook.

Who needs to know What and When

We have several quite different sorts of cavers who interact with troggle:

• The youthful hard caver, who is trained in underground survey techniques but whose interest is limited to handing over the grubby survey notes when she emerges into daylight. Is keen to know how many km of cave she surveyed each year and to see pretty drawn-up surveys (done by someone else). Walks through walls.
• The surface walker who is happy to do route-finding over the plateau, takes lots of photos of cave entrances and cavers enjoying sunshine and may sometimes be able to provide GPS tracks of where he has been. He needs a prospecting guide to find previously identified entrances and be able to find photos of caves in past years. Writes up his explorations in execrable handwriting in the logbook. Looks at walls.
• The diligent student who types up the survey notes into survex file format, transcribes sketch notes onto survex centre-lines, and uses Therion to produce beautiful survey graphics of the caves he has digitised - but who is not a computer geek and whose brain oozes out of his ears when Wookey explains what git is. Applies artistic graffiti to walls.
• The archivist who takes the survex files, the therion files, the GPS files, the scanned survex centrelines and files them in the right places on the expo laptop, uses the troggle reports to help ensure that these are consistent and are filed correctly. Uses troggle input forms to "create new cave" in the system and adds to the directory structures to match the recently discovered caves. Is learning git. When transcribing bad handwriting in logbook (or struggling with git), climbs walls.
• Nerdus maximus: talks python in his sleep and can rebase a hairy git branch without error after 7 bottles of Gosser. Painfully averse to writing documentation. Overstressed, over-caffeinated and with a tendency to mutter that it's all obvious. Oblivious to walls.

These are some of the "use cases" for which troggle needs to be (re)designed to cope with.

Real example

In March 2023, Radost analysed a lot of cave survey and proposed that there were 3 places in 1623-204 Steinbrückenhöhle which were good candiates for linking in with 1623-290 Fischgesicht. So the task is to find the records and find out how difficult those places are to get to, and what it looks like at the exploration limit. We want to find out about Pretzel Passage.

Start with the cave 1623-204 and read the cave description.

1. Start with the master caves list, "Caves" on the left-hand menu on all handbook pages, including this page you are reading now.
2. Find 1623-204 and click on it. It goes to /1623/204/204.html.
3. 204 has a cave description split up into multiple pages, but there is "Glossary of Passage Names". So go to /1623/204/atoz.html
4. Under 'P' we find no passage of that name. Bother. So this is an obscre place not in the Cave Description.
5. Next step is to look at all the survex files.
6. Go back to the Cave Description page and find the heading "Survex File(s)" and click on "All survexfiles for this cave".
7. Now do ctrl-F and search for "Pretzel"
8. There are two surveys: pretzelpassage1 and pretzelpassage2. Radost said it was pretzelpassage2.
9. We can see already that it was Becka and Anthony Day who surveyed it on 27th Aug.2012, and that the raw data is in survey wallet 2012#45.
10. Click on pretzelpassage2 to read the survex file.
11. Bother, the survex file has no cave description in it, whcih is what we were hoping for.
12. OK, look at the raw notes in the survey wallet 2012#45
13. The wallet metadata tells us that the W tick-box is green, which means that either there was no cave description in the survex file or that there was and it had been copied into the website cave description page: red means 'un-finished business'.
14. We see a red box for "T" which means this trip has not been '"Tunneled" (or "Therioned"), or if it has, nobody has recorded it.
15. We see that a Plan exists (green box) but no Elevation (red box).
16. In the file list in the middle of the page we can see plan1.jpg and plan2.jpg. Click on them.
17. Aha! "Stones rattle, sounds of water" that sounds like the lead we are looking for..
18. Now we check through all the other data we have on things that happened on the same day. It is at the botoom of the page.
19. Aha Again! A logbook entry " 204 - Survey Pretzl Passage below Big Boulder Chamber + continue derig"
20. Click on it, and we at last find the passage description that we wanted. Which coupled with the hand-drawin plan sketches in the wallet is all that we needed.