Grottocenter

The Grottocenter is a website which lists caves worldwide. The website is linked below. You need an account, which you can create easily and free of charge by providing a valid e-mail. The data entered is not checked. In other words, anyone can enter and access all the data.

When recording a cave, however, there are points such as Équipement (necessary climbing equipment), rope lengths, anchors and difficulties are recorded. This is absolutely relevant for speleologists, but also for extreme sports enthusiasts and extreme cave tourists. This opens the door to the misuse of caves as sports equipment.

This website has been sponsored by the UIS for a number of years, which is somewhat surprising because it has some massive flaws. Unfortunately, these are of a fundamental nature and contradict the rules of publication that have been applied internationally in speleology for many decades.

Basic functionality: The system is a good document management system and as such is ideal for cave registry work. Nevertheless, it would have to offer real added value for administrators to go to the trouble of converting a currently used system (usually paper) because the work involved is considerable. I cannot recognise this added value. The operators cite online availability as added value, but this is actually the main problem.
Cave protection: Unfortunately, it is freely accessible, you just have to set up an account, and then you can access all content without restrictions. This is absolutely unacceptable for undeveloped caves and contradicts international practice to the detriment of caves. For many decades there has been an agreement not to publish cave coordinates unless the cave is protected by a gate. This is completely irrelevant for academic work. There should actually be graduated access rules and the accounts should be provided with some form of authentication. People have to be identified, need a reputation, full access is only possible for cave registry administrators and particularly trustworthy speleologists. Coordinates in particular should only be displayed to people with a high level of trustworthiness.
Copyright: Then there are problems with copyright, many documents in the cave registry only have the implicit permission of the creator to be kept in the cave registry. This regularly does not include the release to speleologists, and certainly not the publication. Digitisation and free online access is a publication. Anyone who holds the copyright to a published document can sue the system for removal, licence fees and damages. This can only be avoided by having each author sign a corresponding release. With the huge existing cave registry, this is hardly possible, definitely an enormous amount of work. Conversely, this means that the website must not be a publication, i.e. it must not be freely accessible to everyone. This means that not only the coordinates but also the majority of the documents are no longer freely accessible.
GDPR: Then there are data protection issues, many documents contain personal information, and that’s where things quickly get tight. All EU countries had to implement the GDPR, in Germany the law is called DSGVO, and the French also have a similar law. This requires the consent of the authors and all those named in the documents, the appointment of a data protection officer, the release of all data stored about a person on request from that person, and the deletion of all this data on request. Cave registers are not prepared for this, but neither is the Grotto Centre. But with a freely available website, the risk of such requests is high, whereas with a non-public cave register it is non-existent. But just a reminder: according to the GDPR, the storage of personal data is not permitted even if it is not public.
BBS: The idea of using it as a bibliography system is obvious, because the literature for each object is naturally recorded in the cave registry. It works quite well, the input mask records all the relevant information. Unfortunately, it is geographically structured, which means that you have to find the cave on the map to be able to see the literature. Alternatively, you can use the free text search to look for an author or title. However, this can quickly become confusing with commonplace names; searching for literature by an author called Maier, Müller or Schmid leads to an overwhelming number of ‘false hits’. It is unclear how the bibliography is generated from the data; there is no such functionality in the web application. Presumably a report is run manually directly on the database.
Research: It is not obvious at first how to search for content. In the end, there are only two approaches: you use the map and zoom in until you find a pin and click on it, or you use the free text search. Both work very well, but both approaches are suboptimal. In addition, if you were to hide the coordinates for security reasons, the map would become completely unusable. All in all, the system is not really usable because you can’t find anything.

And what is now absolutely necessary to make the system at least suitable for cave data? Quite simply: the user administration needs a complete overhaul, with a hierarchy of rights.

It must be possible to define the necessary authorisation for caves and individual documents so that sensitive documents and caves can be specifically protected. In particular, it must be possible for a cave registry administrator to initially set his data as private, i.e. no-one but himself may see it. He can then release individual caves or documents for individuals, groups or ‘everyone’.
A process is needed to identify users and assign them rights, and the best way to do this is for other trustworthy cavers to serve as character witnesses. This means it is no longer public and both copyright and data protection issues are eliminated or at least significantly reduced.
And for better usability, a convenient way to find content is absolutely essential. Hierarchical access, both geographically and via keywords, is actually the absolute minimum.

These ideas are not new, it’s more or less what cave registry administrators have been doing for a long time. No land registrar will entrust anything to this system without the ability to control who holds what information.