News

January 2001 - UIS Informatics Commission takes on XML Development
After some postings on Cavers Digest the work of authors of DTDs/Schemas/XMLs came to the attention of Peter Matthews, convenor of the International Union of Speleology Informatics Commission. The UISIC has decided to support the development of suitable XML formats for Speleology by providing an international forum for developers. The XML Working Group is led by Andreas Neumann who has setup a web site at: http://www.karto.ethz.ch/neumann/caving/cavexml/

9th December 2000 - CaveScript XML in XML Cover Pages
The XML Cover Pages for XML News, dated December 09, by Robin Cover has a few paragraphs on CaveScript entitled: CaveScript XML for Speleologists. Thanks to Martin Laverty for noticing this.

July 2000 - XML DTD to XML Schema
Martin Laverty has re-cast my original XML DTDs into Schemas. As Martin says in the Glossary on his website. "XML Schema - an XML successor to the DTD for describing the structure and content of XML files. The allowable content can be defined in much more detail so as to increase confidence in the validity of data."

Martin has also created an XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations). This will enable appplications to transform documents from one XML vocabulary (such as CaveScript) to another (such as SVG). This could be a plain text, non XML output such as Survex files, Walls file etc. The details and some great surveying ideas can be seen on his WWW page above.

Dec 1999 - Jan 2000 - MRL develops an initial CaveSurvey & CaveMap DTD