Introducing Lithologs

After some initial experiments with Psicat and SVG we can now offer a new, cool Snet tool: Lithologs. 

Lithologs is a tool which allows to create and plot lithological logs online. It is very inspired by Psicat and internally uses the Psicats XML to store litholog data. But unlike Psicat it plots lithological columns using SVG, which you can also embed in your blog, website etc. like this one (which you cannot see if your browser doesn't support SVG):

It further offers the possibility to store some basic metadata on these geological features.
The project is now in a very early alpha release phase.
More features are planned such as Psicat import and export, and the support of more standards such as OAI-PMH, Geo DC and in the future also GeoSciML..

Online lithology logs

After my first experiments with PSICAT's XML format and SVG, I have started to code a nice little tool which should allow to create lithology logs online!

The whole thing is again based on PSICAT's format. Of course it still lacks many features, however a nice new one is that the tool allows to create both, top-bottom (well logs) as well as bottom-top (outcrop logs) profiles. Astonishingly, this is not suported by most of the tools I wave seen so far.

The current version is very, very basic, it allows to create intervals, beds, to define different lithologies, grain sizes etc.. It still has no name, produces a lot of debug code, results cannot be saved (unless you copy and save the XML and the SVG), it comes without warranty and is therefore very, very alpha..

You can play with it here:
http://www.stratigraphy.net/outcrop/index.php

Don't expect too much ;)

Lithology logs: using Psicat XML to create SVG outputs

PSICAT is a very nice tool to create lithology logs for sediment cores. One of the most interesting features of PSICAT is it's own XML export format. The format is very simple, it basically consists of two element: 'model' and 'property'. 'Model' is just a simple container for data and can represent an Interval, Bed or Lithology etc.. A 'model' can contain several 'property' elements, which represent simple key value pairs. Here is an example:

<model id="158cc6_1250de53dc5_15" parentId="1899213_1244fb3b1d8_1" type="psicat.core.interval.Interval">
<property name="depth.top">0.00</property>
<property name="depth.base">0.60</property>
<property name="grainsize.base">-1.56</property>
<property name="grainsize.top">-1.56</property>
<property name="contact.type">sharp</property>
</model>

Last week I was playing with this format and was surprised how easy to handle it was. In an attempt to do something useful with it, I tried to create an SVG (scalable vector graphics) output based on PSICAT data. And it worked! The first version is able to plot Intervals and Beds quite nice. You can try it here: http://www.stratigraphy.net/psi2svg

UPDATE: The code and tool has been moved, please visit http://www.lithologs.net !

Playing with PSICAT

PSICAT is a nice piece of Java software programmed by Josh Reed which is an excellent tool to draw sedimentological profiles. It was used and promoted within the CHRONOS project and Josh brought it to ANDRILL where he used it to document this exciting antarctic drilling program.

The tool is useful for 95% of all cases when you wish to provide nice graphs and illustrations of your profile. However, it is a bit specialized on core descriptions. For example, if you need to document outcrops and you are used to describe it from the bottom to the top you will feel a bit lost, as PSICAT expects core descriptions which start at the top of each segment.
On the other hand it is very flexible, you can for example add e.g. lithological styles and patterns etc..

For us developers it offers a cool XML export, which allows to use the data within other programs. For example, PSICAT data can be used in the ICDP core decription tool 'DIS' as well as within the extremely cool 'CoreWall' which is used for IODP. As far as I know PSICAT is going to be merged with the Corelyzer tool soon.

... What a coincidence, I just started writing this post on PSICAT and saw Johannes post on profile drawing software.