Introduction

Welcome to the home page for CaveScript XML.

CaveScript (sometimes I leave off the XML) is the generic name of a cave survey and map data format that could store all the information about a cave survey or an entire cave map. It is based on extensible markup language (XML). Here you will find example CaveScript files, utility programs and documentation including the Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and schemas that describe the language.

Currently the suite consists of the following components.

Documentation on the CaveScript XML language - this the first draft of the XML based markup language. There are two XML's - one just for cave surveys (CaveSurvey) and another (CaveMap) for cave maps.
CaveScript DTDs for CaveSurvey and CaveMap XML
CaveScript schema for CaveSurvey XML. Martin Laverty re-cast my original DTDs into Schemas which offer much more. DTDs and schemas define the XML language and allows validating parsers to check CaveScript data. DTDs were the go in 1999 when I started and Schemas were rare.
svx2xml & xml2svx - Perl conversion scripts which can convert Survex data into CaveScript format and vice-versa
CaveView - the program which reads CaveScript map files and outputs a Postscript file for printing. It's just a simple Perl script at present.

Together CaveScript and CaveView will eventually become a complete cave mapping package for producing beautiful cave maps on a computer. That was the primary motivation for creating CaveScript.

Everything you read and download from here is evolving. I don't have a validating parser yet on my Linux box so can't really check the DTD or XML yet. There are bugs in the scripts, the documentation is not as nice as I would like and the software really just doesn't do much yet! But once you have a plan and some direction it's better to produce something and let others contribute to it. That's why it's here.

The software was developed on a Linux platform and all the scripts are in Perl. They should work on any platform. Most of the documentation is in HTML and Postscript. I would certainly appreciate your opinions and feedback.

This is an open-source project so if you want more details about CaveScript or you want to help in the development please contact me. See the contacts page.

Michael Lake
July 2001

The location of this page is at: http://www.speleonics.com.au/cavescript/