Therion: new approach to cave surveying

Therion is a complete package which processes survey data and generates maps or 3D models of caves. It runs on wide variety of platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X. It is completely free, released under the terms of GNU GPL, with source code available. It doesn't require any other commercial software to run.

Therion solves the most annoying problem of cave cartography – how to keep a map of large and complicated cave system always up-to-date. Main features include:

• Complete maps with all the detail. No additional ink stroke is needed.
• Maps are dynamic, always up-to-date – i.e. they are automatically re-drawn after loop closure, blunder fix, scale or symbol set change.
• 3D models are created using 2D maps.

The only similar projects are Tunnel and Walls.

Therion is especially suitable for documenting large and complicated cave systems. List of cave maps created using Therion includes

• Dead Bats Cave (20 km), Cold Wind Cave (2 km), Čachtická Cave (4 km), Belianska Cave (3.6 km), Izbica Cave (3 km), Bystrianska Cave (2.5 km) in Slovakia;
• Great Canyon Cave (7 km of 10 km) in Kosovo;
• other caves in Venezuela, Malaysia, Austria, Czech Republic and others.

Without Therion most of the caves listed above would have no usable map: only a lot of partial maps, sketches and notes which nobody would be able to put together.