Survex is

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

cave surveying software, licensed under the

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. It is designed to be portable and can be run on a variety of platforms, including

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, and

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

. Survex is very powerful cave survey software, and is actively developing into a complete cave visualization package. Centreline data is entered using plain text files, which are processed by 'Cavern'. The text files contain a hierarchy of cave surveys, each of which consists of a list of survey legs, which join survey stations. This program calculates the real world coordinates of survey stations, taking into account loop closure errors using least-squares minimization. This processed data can then be visualised using a GUI front end called Aven. Survex has no arbitrary limits, and so is particularly good for large complicated cave systems, or areas where you need to see the relationships between multiple cave systems. Survex was started in 1990 by Olly Betts and Wookey, and more recently Mark Shinwell has developed 'Aven'. Like most cave surveying software, the motivation for its creation arose from a particular surveying project - Cambridge University Caving Club's explorations in

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

. Survex is currently being used in many large scale survey projects, across the world, for example: UK - Ease Gill Caverns Ogof Draenen, Spain - Picos de Europa, China, Austria - Dachstein, Totes Gerbirge, Indonesia, Mulu{{cite web , title = The Mulu Caves Project , url = http://www.mulucaves.org/ , accessdate = 2007-09-23

Software That Uses Survex

CaveWhere uses cavern, a program in the Survex package, for loop closure and positioning survey stations to

geographical coordinates A geographic coordinate system (GCS) is a spherical or geodetic coordinate system for measuring and communicating positions directly on Earth as latitude and longitude. It is the simplest, oldest, and most widely used type of the various s ...

References

External links

Survex Home Page

Cave surveying Geology software Software that uses wxWidgets