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.