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..

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 !