Spud - a broader definition of "survey data"?

[Andy Waddington on Survey stuff]

precis-ing Julian a bit:

> the actual format is not of importance, just as long as it is
> digital and straightforward to get at

working from a starting point of

> there is a movement ... to archive research papers  ... you can
> get the software for self-archiving the material in a way that
> robots can go and find and organise it

The latter is a major part of the "straightforward to get at" idea. In terms
of organising CUCC's old expedition reports and cave descriptions (which is
closely bound up with some of the ideas being floated for Spud), we are
talking about a lot more work than mere "archiving". This is active
maintenance, so that you go back into old data and add pointers to more
recent work. Whilst a paper archive is "fixed" and its "references" just
cite previous papers, an active archive evolves and contains "references"
into the future, too. Using traditional paper archives (or things that are
simply dumped to discs or tape and put into storage - even assuming you can
actually go back and read them), you have to work backwards and read things
out of sequence, whilst we can now read a narrative thread detailing
exploration in the order it happened.

Putting the stuff into the archive in the first place in such a way that
"robots can go and organise it", ie. add the forward links and do searches
is a major part of the battle. Currently this is a major part of the hard
work of keeping our expedition archive up to date and it would make life
vastly easier if even some of this task was automated.

Andy