CaveMaps - Moving to CNCC Hosting

[CNCC]

CaveMaps - The online home for northern cave surveys​

Many of you will be familiar with the CaveMaps website:

CaveMaps.org

cavemaps.org

For many years, this has been the go-to place for online surveys in our region. It is a superb resource for northern cavers, and our gratitude goes to ‘Cavemapper’ for running it for so long, and all the clubs and individuals who have contributed.

Maintaining websites as technology advances is non-trivial and some of the functions of CaveMaps have started to struggle in recent years. We have recently been in discussion with the site owner who is enthusiastic to find someone to take this forwards.

We are excited to announce that CaveMaps will be moving to CNCC hosting to ensure its continuity.

As a teaser... a slightly new logo but maintaining the familiar CaveMaps colour theme...

The plan is to create a new website (preserving the CaveMaps name) to allow cataloguing, searching and display of surveys, including on mobile devices. This will be linked to CNCC’s website and cave database, to allow click-through from our cave pages to relevant surveys. Content will be easy to add or update with minimal technical knowledge by a small team of administrators.

In the words of our web administrator (a professional web designer) this will be “a very big project”, particularly the transfer and cataloguing of existing site content (>2600 images).

We will bring you more news, and a full launch, later in the year.

In the meantime, if you have produced surveys of northern England or Scottish caves which are not on the current CaveMaps website (or any which are currently only shown as a low-resolution thumbnail), please consider making them digitally available. Once the new site is launched, we will be welcoming new contributions.

 

[CNCC]

We’ve had a fair few people contact us already to request specific surveys for the updated site.

Populating the site with additional surveys will be a community effort. Therefore, if there is a survey you’d like to see made digitally available, we’d welcome your efforts to locate that survey, seek out permission from the publishing club/group and provide/produce a digital version.

For now, you can email pr@cncc.org.uk if you have additional content.

Note: Several people have requested the Ease Gill sheets. We believe these are still available to buy from Red Rose CPC who make periodic reprints, or via Inglesport, so it would be fully understandable if they were not looking to make these digitally available.

Thank you for all the positivity, we’re very excited about this!

 

[andrewmcleod]

Surveys and Journals available! – Red Rose Cave & Pothole Club

The RRCPC have made the first Easegill sheet available online as it's out of print now, so they may be willing to have it hosted on Cavemaps (that is obviously up to them).

 

[langcliffe]

This has probably already been noted, but it would be useful to provide deep zoom-type renditions of the larger sheets, as may be seen here. It's trivial to implement, and very useful.

 

[andrewmcleod]

This has probably already been noted, but it would be useful to provide deep zoom-type renditions of the larger sheets, as may be seen here. It's trivial to implement, and very useful.

Yes, but only if the survey is _also_ available as a flat image which is more useful (since you can take a flat image underground either as printed sheets or on your phone). I can't find that Hammer Pot survey elsewhere on the web, for example, in a form I could print and laminate?

In fact it's probably a general comment that there are quite a number of Northern caves that I know or suspect have been surveyed in the last ten to twenty years (e.g. Jean Pot, much of Leck Fell I think?) and it can be very difficult to find those modern surveys (with a few exceptions like the MMMMC Ireby Fell surveys). Cavemaps is the only really good resource for this I've found; it's a shame though when those surveys disappear into closed club journals and all you get is the thumbnail. I understand it if the survey is for sale (e.g. Easegill surveys) in which case they are accessible, but most clubs don't sell their journals?

 

[Cavematt]

Hi Langcliffe... what exactly is a 'deepzoom' image (other than just a normal image which you can zoom in on and move around - which will be a pretty standard feature)?

 

[langcliffe]

"Deep Zoom" is a technology that allows for the efficient transmission and viewing of large images on websites.

In this example, an image is displayed using standard HTML.

In this example, the same image is displayed using Deep Zoom technology.

Unless you have a very fast connection (which I and many other do not), the first example takes longer than ideal to download, and I submit that whilst one can "zoom in on and move around" the image easily on a touchscreen, one cannot easily do so on a non-touchscreen.

In the second, example the image appears to download rapidly, and I submit that one can easily "zoom in and out, and move around" the image using mouse controls on a non-touchscreen device, and that it works equally well on a touchscreen.

You can get further information on the technology from the appropriate Wikipedia article.

As I implied earlier, I am sure that the CNCC had already considered all this, but I thought that it was a point worth making as the facility is not available on the CaveMapper site. If I remember rightly, it was available for a few surveys, but the technology used to implement the feature became obsolete and was not replaced.

 

[tdobson]

[Basically "tiling like in a maps app"]

 

[ChrisB]

I can't find that Hammer Pot survey elsewhere on the web, for example, in a form I could print and laminate?

You can just right-click the deep zoom image and save as a standard .png (or whatever format it's in)

 

[langcliffe]

Yes, but only if the survey is _also_ available as a flat image which is more useful (since you can take a flat image underground either as printed sheets or on your phone). I can't find that Hammer Pot survey elsewhere on the web, for example, in a form I could print and laminate?

I understand your frustration at not readily having a printable image, but being a Bear of Little Brain, I don't understand why that makes the Deep Zoom version useless.

As posted elsewhere on the forum, the original survey may be found here.

 

[Samouse1]

In fact it's probably a general comment that there are quite a number of Northern caves that I know or suspect have been surveyed in the last ten to twenty years (e.g. Jean Pot, much of Leck Fell I think?) and it can be very difficult to find those modern surveys (with a few exceptions like the MMMMC Ireby Fell surveys). Cavemaps is the only really good resource for this I've found; it's a shame though when those surveys disappear into closed club journals and all you get is the thumbnail. I understand it if the survey is for sale (e.g. Easegill surveys) in which case they are accessible, but most clubs don't sell their journals?

The Cave Registry Data Archive is another place to go to to find a few surveys, such as Notts 2 and Masongill caves surveys. Navigating the Archive may take some getting used to

 

[andrewmcleod]

You can just right-click the deep zoom image and save as a standard .png (or whatever format it's in)

Have you tried it?

Zoomed out you get a low res image, zoomed in you only get what you can see on the screen.

 

[andrewmcleod]

I understand your frustration at not readily having a printable image, but being a Bear of Little Brain, I don't understand why that makes the Deep Zoom version useless.

As posted elsewhere on the forum, the original survey may be found here.

Not useless, just less useful as you can't get the image easily into any other form.

 

[langcliffe]

Not useless, just less useful as you can't get the image easily into any other form.

"Less useful" is a point of view that this Bear with a Little Brain can understand, and even have some sympathy for. In the case of the Hammer Pot survey, it was already available elsewhere.

 

[andrewmcleod]

In my defence I only said a flat image was 'more useful'; I never used the word 'useless' thanks for reminding me that the Cave Registry Archive has surveys on it (although cavemaps would certainly be a more accessible place for the outputs of survey projects i.e. the final surveys). I found the Jean Pot survey that I had failed to find recently
And thanks of course to the many people over the years who have actually surveyed the caves in the first place so I don't get lost despite my dubious sense of direction underground

 

[ChrisB]

Have you tried it?

Zoomed out you get a low res image, zoomed in you only get what you can see on the screen

Yes, I tried it. The image looked to me to be at a resolution suitable for printing at A4. On a big flat image I usually end up zooming in to the important bits and printing the screen anyway.

 

[langcliffe]

Hi Langcliffe... what exactly is a 'deepzoom' image (other than just a normal image which you can zoom in on and move around - which will be a pretty standard feature)?

@Cavematt : Did I manage to answer your question to your satisfaction?

 

[Cavematt]

Hi Langcliffe, I think so, thank you!

I have already seen the currently in-development version of the new CaveMaps, and I think all the surveys allow you to zoom in and move around like the DeepZoom you have linked to above. I kind of assumed this was just a normal thing for any modern website image display, but I maybe got confused by it having the specific 'DeepZoom' name which got me wondering whether this was some kind of specialist software.

Unless I've still not understood something (which, given my technical knowledge is quite... actually, very likely)!

 

[andrewmcleod]

Hi Langcliffe, I think so, thank you!

I have already seen the currently in-development version of the new CaveMaps, and I think all the surveys allow you to zoom in and move around like the DeepZoom you have linked to above. I kind of assumed this was just a normal thing for any modern website image display, but I maybe got confused by it having the specific 'DeepZoom' name which got me wondering whether this was some kind of specialist software.

Unless I've still not understood something (which, given my technical knowledge is quite... actually, very likely)!

It's just the difference between something where you load the whole image and you can then zoom into it and pan around, and a tile-based system (more like Google Maps) where you don't initially load the whole image and just load higher-resolution versions it as you zoom in and pan around (so you don't need to load the whole image and bring your machine to a bit of a crawl). It's the sort of thing you need for mapping (where obviously you can't load the whole Earth when you open the website) or those very very high resolution panoramic images (100s of megapixels) where the whole image can be hundreds of megabytes or more).

For most cave surveys, that extra performance is probably unnecessary because the whole survey will not be that big an image; it would be more significant for very much bigger caves >50km length or whatever. But the JS frontend usually also provides a convenient user interface for the zooming and panning anyway even if the performance isn't really needed (you _could_ just a simpler image-based pan and zoom JS interface, but if you have even a single larger survey then why bother having two separate interfaces?).

I think CaveMaps is using OpenSeaDragon to (presumably) load from DeepZoom formatted tile sources.

DZI Tile Source | OpenSeadragon

 

[langcliffe]

Hi Langcliffe, I think so, thank you!

I have already seen the currently in-development version of the new CaveMaps, and I think all the surveys allow you to zoom in and move around like the DeepZoom you have linked to above. I kind of assumed this was just a normal thing for any modern website image display, but I maybe got confused by it having the specific 'DeepZoom' name which got me wondering whether this was some kind of specialist software.

Unless I've still not understood something (which, given my technical knowledge is quite... actually, very likely)!

Thank you for the reply, @Cavematt.

Zooming and panning is not standard HTML / CSS technology, although libraries have been developed based on the CSS transform feature that provide fairly basic facilities.

What has become a de facto tool to achieve the same is the Seadragon JavaScript library that I use. This requires large images to be split up into a myriad of tiles at different resolutions, but there are tools available that do this for you. In the example shewn above, 750 tiles are involved. Hence a lot more storage space is used. Also, as @andrewmcleod indicated above, in the context of the Cavemapper library, one also requires the ability to download the image in its original format.

Anyway, it's excellent news that such a facility is being provided, and I look forward to using it. I was always a keen supporter of Cavemapper's efforts, and it's good to see that they will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.

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