Diploma Thesis Michaela Urban

Webbasiertes Höhlenkataster – Konzeption und prototypische Umsetzung eines speläologischen Informationssystems für Sachsen

Abstract

Speleology is an interdisciplinary science dealing with all questions around caves. Worldwide, the exploration of subterranean cavities bring enlightening, geological or impressive, biological discoveries to light. Those numerous information is collected in regional cave registers, which save that knowledge for future generations and provide data for analysis. Also in Saxony there are many enthusiastic hobby scientists from different disciplines of speleology. Over the years they established huge collections and archives, mostly in paper form and sometimes containing redundant data. The goal of this thesis is to build a development basis of a web based cave register for Saxony, providing a central and digital database that stores all information about caves. This is a crucial improvement of safety and interpretability. As part of requirement analysis the existing data sets were evaluated, a selection of cave registers concerning other regions were studied and the specifications of a speleological information system (SIS) were collected. The database scheme, which is one of the most important components, was developed during design. Moreover, this chapter focuses on service oriented architecture (SOA), as well as user management of this web application. At the end, there is an explorative prototype that already implements the key features and serves as a starting point for the first public version of the system.