The main software we use to process cave data and surface surveys is survex which has been written over several decades by CUCC cavers. The first version was written during the 1990 Expo in Austria in the (old) potato hut.
Download the survex package here: www.survex.com and install it.
You will discover that the application installed is actually called "aven" but do not be concerned. This is what you will use to visualise .svx files as beautiful cave centre-line surveys.
If you are entering new survey data from a new cave, you will also need either TunnelX or Therion to convert your sketches into actual plan and elevation presentation-quality surveys.
Tunnel was written by Julian Todd (18 Austrian expos since 1989). It allows the generation of full 3D models of cave passages which can be viewed using a VRML browser.
TunnelX installation and running.
TunnelX detailed wiki documentation (old).
GPS is increasingly important for all the surface work.
GPS Prune is a vitally useful utility.
Loch This is fork off of Therion's loch program. The goal is to model Cave systems in 3d and have a high degree of interaction between the user and the information. There is currently no working version and is under very heavy development.
TopoLinux consists of cave surveying applications for Linux PC and Android devices. TopoDroid is an Open Source Android app to make cave surveys with the DistoX.
psurvex My task was to write a new program which could read the data from an external file, ideally one which resembled a .svx file as much as possible. Psurvex supports only a subset of the .svx file format but the same file should process in Survex without any problems. You need to write a .svx file and save it somewhere on your machine. This program will then process the file and create a second file containing a list of points for plotting on graph paper and some statistics about your survey.