Troggle is the content management system which runs much of the the cave survey data management and also presents the data on the website and manages the Expo Handbook.
You may have arrived here by accident when where you really need to be is website history.
This page is mostly an index to other records of what troggle is and what plans have been made - but never implemented - to improve it.
Everything here should be updated or replaced - this page just records a lot of unfinished ideas.
Most people will not want to read this at all. This is for speleosoftwarearcheologists only.
Troggle is the software collection (not really a "package") based on Django originally intended to manage all expo data in a logical and accessible way and publish it on the web. It was first used on the 2009 expo - see 2009 logbook.
Only a small part of troggle's original plan was fully implemented and deployed. Many of the things it was intended to replace are still operating as a motley collection written by many different people in several languages (but mostly perl and python; we won't talk about the person who likes to use OCamL). Today troggle is used for only three things:
The first thing to do is to read: "Troggle: a novel system for cave exploration information management", by Aaron Curtis, CUCC.
Two things to remember are
Yes you can log in to the troggle control panel: expo.survex.com/troggle.
It has this menu of commands:
All Survex | Scans | Tunneldata | 107 | 161 | 204 | 258 | 264 | Expo2016 | Expo2017 | Expo2018 | Django admin
Assumptions (points to necessarily agree upon)
At one time Martin Green attempted to reimplement troggle as "stroggle" using flask at git@gitorious.org:stroggle/stroggle.git (but gitorious has been deleted).
A copy of this project is archived by Wookey on wookware.org/software/cavearchive/stroggle/.
CUCC still has a list of things that at one time were live tasks, reproduced here: from caving.soc.srcf.net/wiki/Troggle
Troggle is a system under development for keeping track of all expo data in a logical and accessible way, and displaying it on the web. At the moment, it is under development at http://troggle.cavingexpedition.com/ But note that this is Aaron's version of troggle, forked from the version of troggle we use. Aaron uses this for the Erebus expedition.
Note that the information there is incomplete and editing is not yet enabled.
Feature |
Old expo website |
Troggle: planned |
Troggle: progress so far |
|---|---|---|---|
Logbook |
Yes; manually formatted each year |
Yes; wiki-style |
Start at the front page, [1] and click to logbook for year. The logbooks have been parsed back to 1997. |
Cave index and stats generated from survex file |
Yes |
Yes |
Done; see [2] |
Survey workflow helper |
Yes; minimal. surveys.csv produced an html table of whose surveys were not marked “finished” |
Yes. Makes table of surveys per expo which shows exactly what needs doing. Displays scans. Integrated with survex, scanner software, and tunnel. |
See it at http://troggle.cavingexpedition.com/survey . Be sure to try a recent year when we should have data. Survex, scanner, and tunnel integration still needs doing. |
QM lists generated automatically |
Depends on the cave. Each cave had a different system. |
Yes; unified system. |
Done, but only 204 and 234 Qms have been imported from old system so far. No view yet. |
Automatic calendar for each year of who will be on expo when |
No, manually produced some years |
Yes |
Done; see http://troggle.cavingexpedition.com/calendar/2007 (replace 2007 with year in question) |
Web browser used to enter data |
No |
Yes |
Everything can be edited through admin, at http://troggle.cavingexpedition.com/admin . Ask aaron, martin, or julian for the password if you want to have a look / play around with the admin site. Any changes you make will be overwritten. Eventually, data entry will probably be done using custom forms. |
Cave and passage descriptions |
Yes, manually html coded. |
Yes, wiki-style. |
Not done yet. |
Expo handbook |
Yes, manually html coded. |
|
Not done yet. |
Table of who was on which expo |
Yes |
Yes |
Data has been parsed, this view hasn't been written yet. |
Signup form, System for keeping contact, medical and next of kin info |
No |
Yes |
Signup form should be ready by 20 Jan. |
Automated photo upload and gallery |
No; some manual photo galleries put together with lots of effort |
Yes |
Photo upload done, gallery needs writing. |
Search |
No |
Yes |
ckan is something like this - could we use it? esri online CUCC (troggle) http://cucc.survex.com/ - this site. virgina caves database (access+arcgis) (futrell) each country database Austria (spelix) ( www.spelix.at/ UK cave registry mendip cave registry: (access) www.mcra.org.uk/wiki/doku.php White mountains database (gpx + google earth) Matienzo (?) Fisher ridge (stephen cladiux) hong meigui (erin) (ask erin later) Wikicaves www.grottocenter.org/ multilingual, slippymap, wiki data entry. includes coordinate-free caves. focus on sport-caving type info (access, basic gear list, overall description, bibliography) e.g. australians only publish coordinates to nearest 10km turkey www.tayproject.org. www.uisic.uis-speleo.org/contacts.html change link. no-one looks for list of databases under 'contacts' graziano ferrari northern italy list (access + google earth)
Generally I'd like to find some people (geeks) that share these technical ideas: (1) store things in a file system, (2) use XML, (3) do not aim too high (do not try designing a general system for handling all caving-related data for the whole world). If I could find some people that agree with this, then we could try to reach a compromise on: (1) how do we store our data in a file system, (2) how do we use this XML (let's do a common spec, but keep it simple) (3) how do we aim not to high and not end up dead like CaveXML :) After we do that, everyone goes away to do their own projects and write their own code. Or maybe we have some degree of co-operation in actually writing the code. Normal life. But the idea is that all geeks working on "cave inventory" and systems making extensive use of cave inventories try to adhere to this framework as much as possible. So that we can then exchange our tools. I think things like "which revision system do we use" or "do we use web or Python" are really secondary. Everyone has their own views, habits, backgrounds. My idea is to work on this in a small group (no more than a few persons) - to get things going fast, even if they are not perfect from the beginning. If it works, we try to convince others to use it and maybe push it through UIS.
forms ----- 1) members read/write folk.csv and year/members 2) cave read/write cave_data, entrance_data, surveys/pics 3) trips -> logbook , QMs, or surveys (more than one survey or location possible) 4) logbook reads/write year/logbook 5) survey 6) prospecting app forms show who is logged in. databases --------- trips, read from logbook entry folder year#index .svx files description QMs members (cache from form) caves caves_data entrance_data storage: expoweb data/ cave_entrances caves descriptions loser foo.svx
frontpage --------- quick to load: Links: Caves number, name, location Years Handbook Data Entry Main Index Slippy map: Indexes to cave page Cave page: Access, description, photos, QMs, Survey Years: Logbooks/surveynotes/survexdata/people matrix Documents Data Entry: Logbook entry Survey data Survey Notes Cave description QMs Photos New cave Backend datafiles: caves/ cave_entrance cave_data directory of info years/ year/ logbook pubs/ reports admin/ lists who_and_when travel jobs surveyscans/ year/ index #num handbook/ (all static info) Storage: non-html or > 200K go in 'files' (PDF, PNG, JPEG, DOC, ODF, SVG) convert small 800x600 version into website by default. (matching structure?