Cave surveying - GIS with a Z-axis

Caves surveying is a pretty obscure niche in mapping, with its own set of software. There have been great FLOSS tools since the 1980s, and in the last few years cavers realised that they could use 'normal GIS' too, so a slow convergence is underway. This talk will give a brisk tour of the FLOSS tools we use, and also talk about the complicated problem of managing datasets spanning 40, 50 or even 100 years, with changing equipment, formats, personnel and computing kit.

And we'll touch on the future of Lidar and VR for 3D space modelling.

Prominent projects are Survex: http://survex.com Therion: https://therion.speleo.sk/ Loser Expo/Troggle: expo.survex.com Tunnelx/Tunnelvr: https://github.com/goatchurchprime/tunnelx/ SexyTopo: https://github.com/richsmith/sexytopo Topodroid: https://sites.google.com/site/speleoapps/home/topodroid