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A project to digitise historical caving incident reports and make them available online.

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Caving Incident Report DB

This is a project which aims to digitise the archive of National Speleological Society American Caving Accidents caving incident reports, which cover most caving incidents that have happened in the United States of America and nearby countries since humans first entered caves for sport.

This repository consists of both a Django application to display and edit the digitised incident reports, as well as code and data related to digitising them to enable them to be uploaded to the Django application.

The Django application is running at aca.caver.dev, should you wish to take a look. You may also wish to view the about page on the website for more information about the project.

Django application

This fairly straightforward application lives within the reportdb/ and etc/ folders, and is run using docker-compose (or Dokku in production). The applications allows a basic CRUD interface for incident reports, and has management commands (import_json and import_csv) to enable the mass import of incident reports from the processing scripts in data/.

The Django application allows web based editing and approval of incidents, easily enabling humans to check the work of the AI formatter before marking an incident report as 'approved' and ready for consumption by the public.

Data and processing

The data/ directory contains the archive of ACA Journals in a number of formats with varied levels of processing.

The original PDFs of the journals are contained in data/pdf/. These PDF files were run through Amazon AWS Textract, and processed with a simple script, to generate the text files within data/processed/txt. These text files were then further processed by hand to generate the ones contained within the data/processed/txt-split/ directory, where non-incident report text has been removed and each incident report separated by three dashes (---) within the text file to allow easier machine separation of incidents.

The files from data/processed/txt-split/ were then processed using the OpenAI API by means of the script contained within the data/openai-formatter/ directory. This script produces JSON arrays of each incident, with relevant metadata (such as the cave name, date, incident report, cavers involved) separated. The results from this are contained in the data/json/ directory.

These JSON files are the final stage of processing before the data is added to the Django web application, which is then used by volunteers to check the work of the AI formatter before making the incident available for all to view online.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome - both in terms of code, and volunteering to help edit incidents on the production Django app. For more information, please join our Discord server.

Licence

This project is licensed under the GNU GPL v3.0. For more information see the LICENCE file.

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A project to digitise historical caving incident reports and make them available online.

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