About The Author...

Jochen Duckeck

	Image: After a surveying tour with friends, some years ago! (I am the guy with the blue hat)

Hello folks, my name is Jochen Duckeck. I am the webmaster and the author of showcaves.com. On this page I will tell you a little bit about me.

Image: Me, climbing down a rope ladder into a small vertical cave below my home town  Laichingen, Germany.

I have been a member of a German Höhlenverein (caving club) since the age of fifteen. I once was an active caver, as the historic photographs on this page prove! Today I am too fat for caving, so I became an armchair caver. I am now caving in cyberspace maintaining this site and other speleo web sites.

I am cave guide in the small show cave of my hometown, the Laichinger Tiefenhöhle (Laichingen Vertical Cave). If you want to meet me, visit my cave, get a guided tour in German or English!

After school and army I went to  Braunschweig (Brunswick), a city in the northern part of Germany, to study computer science and geology. There were no caves or caving clubs in this area, and unfortunately the most interesting caves in the nearby Harz where on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But after 1989, when the DDR (German Democratic Republic) collapsed, I had the chance to visit them, and collecting information about these little known East German show caves was the beginning of these show cave pages.

When I started to work, I found a job in the beautiful and interresting city of  Nürnberg (Nuremberg). I am programming Java Servlets.

I am interested in cave surveying, but more in the mathematics and the algorithms, than in crawling through narrow passages carrying compass and tape measure. I already worked with the geometric modelling of three dimensional objects in my diploma thesis (see my paper  3D-Modeling for the Analysis of Range Data). Now I am member of the  Arbeitskreis Speläokartographie (Working Group Speleocartography), a meeting of (German speaking) cave surveyers and programmers. I am webmaster of their website.

As an addition to my involvement in the speleocartography group I am the German delegate for the  UIS Informatics Commission (UISIC) appointed by the  Verband der deutschen Höhlen- und Karstforscher e.V. (German Speleological Federation).

And last but not least I am life member of the  National Speleological Society (NSS). My NSS number is 48284. Okay, I confess: I just did it to get the NSS News and discounts on books....

Jochen Duckeck, Archivstr. 11, 90408 Nürnberg, Germany, Tel: +49-911-355029. E-mail: .
More contact info here.