International Union of Speleology
Informatics Commission - Dictionary Sub-commission
Dictionary published: 2023-04-30 Edition 21
This Introduction updated: 2023-05-07
This is the UIS on-line multi-lingual dictionary of caving and speleological terms. It is a living dictionary that is constantly being added to and tuned as an International joint effort among speleologists. Everyone is invited to participate - this could be just correcting a mis-spelling, contributing a whole new language, or adding definitions to our Glossary. If you do want to contribute a whole new language, please do refer to our page on the best way to do it and to download the template.
Since the addition of the Glossary in April 2023, the "Dictionary" now consists of two main parts: the original UIS Caver's Multi-lingual Dictionary (a multi-lingual wordlist), and the UIS Cave and Karst Glossary (the term definitions, currently mainly English but eventually multi-lingual).
Of course, many other workers have contributed significantly in this field - see the bibliography and the web links below. We are hoping that some of these other authors will be able to join in and make this a truly International on-line joint effort, and so rapidly increase its usefulness to all of us.
While there is still a place for hardcopy versions, some of the advantages of this on-line version are:
In 2022 we started a project to produce a glossary with definitions of speleo terms, and then in April 2023 we published the first pass of the UIS Cave and Karst Glossary, with the English definitions for 2700 terms. This has allowed us to at last link our Concept terms to their definitions, making it a real dictionary, something we have wanted to do since the original edition. In later editions we hope to have links also to the definitions for the Dictionary concepts that are currently missing from the Glossary, and to allow multiple links from the one Concept language. And also of course the addition of links from terms in the other languages as soon as glossaries in those languages become available.
In April 2023 we also added a new page where all the concepts are grouped according to their speleo subject. This pulls all like concepts together instead of them being scattered through the page according to their Hungarian alphabetic order.
The work of the Dictionary is being co-ordinated by Prof. Dr. Mladen GARAŠIĆ of Croatia, Leader of the Dictionary Sub-commission of the Informatics Commission of the International Union of Speleology. Please get in touch with him if you would like to help with the work.
In terms of the "back-room" work, the database system, loading of languages, and the web pages have been created and managed by Peter Matthews of Australia since the original web version in 1998. Then in 2022 he was joined by Mike Lake of Australia to help with the production of the Glossary, and the coming conversion of the Dictionary production system from Peter's local PC to a modern "open source" facility allowing more flexible management.
In 1997 at the Swiss UIS Congress, Attila KÓSA from Hungary presented a paper on his existing hardcopy multi-lingual publication, The Caver's Living Dictionary ( Kósa 1995/6), and lamented the cost and the labour of publishing updated editions. After the paper, Peter Matthews of the Informatics Commission suggested to him that converting it to a web page would solve the cost problem, avoid the need for a separate version alphabetically ordered per language, and would allow frequent updating. Attila enthusiastically agreed, brought his existing data right up to date, and Peter then used this for the initial database-generated web page in 1998. This covered Attila's original languages of Hungarian, French, German and English, with the sort order by Hungarian terms of course. The database made it easier to maintain and to re-create the web pages.
Sadly, Attila died on 2003-10-20 [ Obituary ]. His hard work and that of his collaborators had brought the Dictionary up to eight languages - English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. In June 2005 we were fortunate to find a new Leader when Mladen GARAŠIĆ very kindly offered to take over the work. Now we have many more languages (28 as of Oct 2022), and in 2023 we added the first pass of our Glossary with definitions for 2700 terms, and have linked most Dictionary concepts to these definitions. More details of the updates made over the years can be found on our Updates History page.
Web page encoding - the technicals: Over the period, the technique of our web page creation has passed through three stages, caused by the fact that a web page could originally be character-encoded according to only one 256-character, 8-bit "code-page": So firstly, we had one web page for Western European languages and a separate web page for Central European Latin text languages (Actually, our first web page used only Western European characters, so poor old Hungarian had to miss out on the proper accent on its double-acute characters); second, when Unicode became available to HTML "entity codes", we were able to present all languages on the same web page by converting their character encoding from the original code-page they were supplied to us in to the equivalent HTML entity codes, thus allowing languages such as those using cyrillic or Arabic text; and third, the current method, when languages started being submitted to us already in UTF-8 Unicode by default, they were stored in this way in the database and needed no conversion on their way to the web page, because web pages could also now support multi-8-bit-byte UTF-8 encoding directly, instead of only 8-bit code pages. (Depending on the character, UTF-8 encoding stores the character using from one to four 8-bit bytes, rather than being limited to a single 8-bit byte per character.) Eventually in our database we converted our earlier languages that were stored encoded according to their respective code page, into multi-byte UTF-8 encoding in the database, thus all our languages now needed no conversion on their way to the web page, and all languages including Japanese, Chinese and Korean could now easily be presented on the same web page.
Just to show we are not narrow-minded.... And please let us know of any further links or changes.
Collaborators:
Those who have contributed significantly to this project to date.
| AKŠAMOVIĆ, Uroš (RS) | Serbian 2009 |
| ANDREYCHOUK, Viacheslav (PL & UK) | Polish helper 2013; Ukrainian & Russian 2014 |
| CARREÑO, Rafael (VE) | Spanish 1999 |
| CIGNA, Arrigo (IT) | Latin 2013 |
| CHABERT, Claude (FR) | French 1998 |
| EDALATIAN-ARASTEH, Sarah (IR) | Farsi/Persian helper 2009 |
| FEKETE, Alexandru (RO) | Romanian 1999 |
| FERRARI, Graziano (IT) | Italian 2000 |
| FIELD, Malcolm (US) | Author and supplier of Glossary first pass 2022 |
| FORD, Derek (CA) | Polish helper 2013 |
| GARAŠIĆ, Mladen (HR) | Croatian 2006; current Dictionary Leader 2005- |
| GOTO, Satoshi (JP) | Japanese helper 2013 |
| GOUTIER, Silvia (NL) | Dutch 2012 |
| HAHSEMINEZHAD, Saeed (IR) | Farsi/Persian 2009 |
| HARYONO, Eko (ID) | Indonesian helper 2012 |
| ISHIKAWA, Norihiko (JP) | Japanese helper 2013 |
| ITODA, Naofumi (JP) | Japanese helper 2013 |
| KAMPOLIS, Isidoros (GR) | Greek 2013 |
| KLIMCHOUK, Alexander (UK) | Ukrainian, & Russian helper 2014 |
| KÓSA, Attila (HU) | Hungarian 1998 and original Dictionary;
original Dictionary Leader 1997-2003 |
| KRAWCZYK, Wiesława (PL) | Polish 2013; Ukrainian & Russian helper 2014 |
| LAICONAS, Erikas (LT) | Lithuanian 2013 |
| LAKE, Mike (AU) | Dictionary & Glossary systems helper 2022- |
| LI, Qingqing (CN) | Chinese 2018 and 2019 |
| LUNDBERG, Johannes (SE) | Swedish 2012 |
| MAREK-LIMAGNE, Edit (FR,HU) | French, Hungarian 1998 |
| MATTHEWS, Peter (AU) | Database system & web pages 1997- |
| MIHEVC, Andrej (SI) | Slovenian 2013 |
| MLADENOVIĆ, Ana (RS) | Serbian helper 2009 |
| OBRUK Cave Research Group (TR) | Turkish 2017 |
| OKOUCHI, Ayumi (JP) | Japanese 2013 |
| OLDHAM, Tony (GB) | English 1998 |
| SANDERS, Elvira (NL) | Dutch helper 2012 |
| SCHUSTER, Roger (DE) | German 1998 |
| SJÖBERG, Rabbe (SE) | Swedish 2012 |
| SUNKAR, Arzyana (ID) | Indonesian 2012 |
| Speleo Club du Liban (LB) | Arabic 2017 |
| de SWART, Herman (NL) | Dutch helper 2012 |
| TACHEV, Ivo (BG) | Bulgarian 2009 |
| THEODOSIADIS, Thomas (GR) | Greek helper 2013 |
| TRAVASSOS, Luiz Eduardo Panisset (BR) | Portuguese 1999 and 2009 |
| YOKOTA, Kakuteru (JP) | Japanese helper 2013 |
| YULIANTO, Bagus (ID) | Indonesian helper 2012 |
| URATA, Kensaku (JP) | Japanese helper 2013 |
| URBANI, Franco (VE) | Spanish helper 1999 |
| VLČEK, Lukáš (SK) | Slovak 2022 |
| WOO, Kyung Sik (KR) | Korean 2013 |
Contributors:
Others who have made suggestions for additions or corrections, or have helped in other ways to date:
ASHBROOK, Bert (US). The Greater Allentown Grotto. Jun 1998.
BADDELEY, Glenn (AU). Dec 2018 and earlier. Hosted several other glossaries.
BARTHOLEYNS, Jean-Pierre (BE). Apr 2015.
BISCHOFF, Brian (IS). Oct 1999.
BLANCHARD, David (FR). Mar 2015.
CARRANZA, Carlos Goicoechea (CR). Jun 2013.
CIGNA, Arrigo (IT). Mar 2013.
CRYSTAL, Bonnie (US). Speleoradiology Western Survey. May 1998.
CSER, Ferenc (AU). Jun 1998.
DE SCHRYVER, Jacques (FR). Aug 1999.
ELLIOTT, Bill (US). Missouri Department of Conservation. Jun 1998.
ESKES, David (NL). Speleo Nederland. May 1998.
FERRARI, Graziano (IT). May 1998.
GARAŠIĆ, Mladen (HR). May 1998.
HILL, Carol (US). May 1998.
HILL, Paul (US). May 1998.
KOZLOV, Mykyta (UK). Nov 2016.
LARIO, Javier (ES). Departamento de Geologia, Museo Nacional de
Ciencias Naturales. Jun 1998.
LABEGALINI, José Ayrton (BR). May 1999.
MALECKAR, Franci (SI) Feb. 1999
MINTON, Mark (US) Jul 2000.
ONAC, Bogdan (US) Jun 2013.
PRICE, Liz (GB). Apr 99, Jun 1999.
PROFFITT, Merrilee (US). May 1998.
SMITH, Garry (AU). Apr 2014.
STEVEN, Linda (FR). Aug 1999.
WADDINGTON, Andy (GB). Northern Pennine Club & Cambridge Univ. C.C. Jun 1998.
Sub-commission Leader: Prof. Dr. Mladen
GARAŠIĆ, Croatia.
Dictionary system and web pages: Peter MATTHEWS, Australia.