The Survey Grid displays a list of all people who have surveyed in the cave, along with the total length of all the surveys they have worked on, the number of surveys and the total number of shots. The gird also lists the first survey the participate in.
Sorting. Clicking on the heading for each will sort the list by that column. Each time you click on a column header, the program alternates between ascending and descending order. The image above shows the data for Lechuguilla sorted by number of feet surveyed. In this case Peter Bosted, John Lyes and Donald Davis have surveyed the most passage by length.
Individual Statistics. Double clicking on a particular surveyor will display the Surveyor Details window which displays more information about that survey's work.
Name Issues. You may notice that some of the name in the list are wrong, garbled or combined with other names and information. This is because survey team information entered into Compass is highly variable and there is no consistent pattern for entering surveyor's names. If you notice problems like this, the problem is easily fixed by editing the team information to make it more consistent.
One of the data items in the surveyor grid, is the "first survey" the person participated in. You can search for this survey in the survey tree and then edit the survey team to fix the problem.
To fix problems with survey team names, it is useful to understand how Compass processes team names. Because of the inconsistencies in the way survey team members are entered, Compass has to work hard to extract and separate all the names in the file. For example, all seven of these common patterns for entering names may be the same person:
Steve Smith
Steven Smith
S. Smith
Smith, Steve
Smith, Steven
Smith, S.
Smith
Based on analysis of entry practices for several caves, Compass makes certain assumptions about how the names are entered:
| • | 1. Name are entered in First Name, Last Name order. |
| • | 2. Each name is separated by a comma. |
| • | 3. Semicolons are converted to comma |
| • | 4. Periods are removed so that abbreviated first names with and without periods are treated the same. . |
| • | 5. Compass removes all other non-alphanumeric characters such as "\", "/", ":", "&" etc. |
| • | 6. When multiple question marks that entered to indicate an unknown surveyor, they are concatonated to a single question mark to group unknown surveyors together. |
| • | 7. Common job descriptions are removed from the names. For example, "book", "foresights", "inst.", "instruments", "leadtape", "tape", "inventory", "notes", and "lead" are removed. |
| • | 8. Since the job description is sometimes put inside parentheses, all parenthesis and the text inside are removed. |
In general, I encourage people to use the following format for surveyor names.
1. Enter name first name then last name.
2. Separate team member with a comma.
3. Put survey job descriptions in parenthesis.
4. Be consistent with first name. Spell out the first name, don't use abbreviations.
This would be an example fo the correct format.
Jim Brown (book), Mike Smith (tape), Bill Jones (instrument)