GAVIA - BIRD NOTEBOK TOOLS


0. BACKGROUND

Since we started out as birdwatchers in the early 1980s, my brother
and I have tried to write down all observatione we've made - not
exactly where we saw each individual bird, but at least approximate
numbers and locations. Jonas in particular has huge stacks of
notebooks with detailed info for each excursion.

We believe it is important to not only keep track of which rare
species one has seen in a year or in a lifetime (as some of the most
decadent twitchers do) but to keep the raw data on more common species
as well. 

I do not believe in Artportalen, the Swedish web portal/database for
sightings of among other things birds, as a replacement for the
personal diary.  Its user interface and social aspects distort and
distract; it will not prove as useful for future scientists as
popularly believed.


1. GAVIA

Gavia is the latest in a series of tool sets I've written to faciliate
writing down our observations. Before that, there was "Lanius", a
GUI-based excursion database thingy for the Commodore-Amiga.

The most important task for Gavia is to make it easy to enter data
from an excursion by picking from a full list of species (or, rather,
make it more difficult to forget entering a species).

Ironically, this major part of Gavia now consists of a handful of perl
scripts and an emacs macro. Why write a dedicated interactive user
interface when you can get an existing text editor to do the boring
stuff for you for free?

Gavia is released under a BSD-style license; see the LICENSE file.


2. REQUIREMENTS

To compile and install gavia, you'll need a C++11 compiler and Perl.

To compile the unit tests, you need orchis:  git://snipabacken.se/orchis.

You also need to be on a Unix-like system. Personally, I'm on a Linux
box and have never tried to compile for anything but Linux and OpenBSD.

For my daily use of gavia, I rely on Perl, a revision control system
(CVS or Git these days), and GNU Emacs. You can avoid some of these
depending on how you use gavia and how much you're willing to
customize the (admittedly trivial) scripts.


3. INSTALLATION

% make && make install

should be enough to compile and install gavia into /usr/local.
To install it elsewhere, you have to edit the Makefile.

This creates files in bin/, man/, lib/gavia/ and share/emacs/site-lisp/.

Some of the files in lib/gavia/ are more or less example config files
for various gavia commands.  You are encouraged to create custom
versions in your home directory -- see the man pages for details.

There is at least one non-manpage piece of documentation -- "Using
Gavia in combination with CVS". It is not installed by default, and
it's not vital.


4. EDITING SUPPORT

What Gavia does is primarily to simplify data entry, and it does that
partly by relying on a standard text editor.

Thus, Gavia includes gavia-mode, a simple GNU Emacs editing mode which
adds color highlighting to gavia_stellata(1) and the excursion files
in general, and also makes the [F4] key mark a species as seen.

You /may/ have to install it manually somewhere that emacs can find
it.

A user can make use of gavia-mode by customizing her ~/.emacs to
include something like either of these two lines:

    (require 'gavia-mode)
    (load "~/elisp/gavia-mode.el")

Files with the filename suffix ".gavia", or containing the

    -*- gavia -*-

tag on the first line will then be opened using gavia-mode.

It should be fairly easy to implement similar things for other quality
text editors.  Emacs happens to be the one I use.


5. DISCLAIMER

You may have noted already that this isn't a ready solution. Correct -
it's a hack that does what I need it to do and little else.

It's also specific for my country, Sweden.  The species list is
primarily in swedish, and the selection of taxa is oriented towards
birding here.  You're welcome to try to modify it to work in other
regions; I'll probably never get around to it myself.


Jörgen Grahn <[email protected]>