To maintain the excavation records in the 1715 Fleet maps, it's necessary to input the text data using some form of database. The Daily Log Sheets turned in by the salvors are the source of this information. There are a number of ways to do this, including importing directly from CSV files, filling out a database form, or typing into tools provided directly within AutoCAD. But somewhere along the line, the hand-written Daily Log Sheet, or an import of the text in the digital form of the Daily Log Sheet must be added to the maps. This can be very labor intensive. Presumably, the attributes are constantly being updated and corrected where they are found in error. However, without actually extracting all of the attributes and checking their ditems sum total, this can be a chore, and with more and more data to control with each passing salvage season, difficulty might be compounded.


If you use DigFindR, you can extract all of the attribute data and examine it in a matter of minutes. In the following examples, the 2016 map file for Corrigans Patch, as distributed to contractors, is being used.


In the following example, a legitimate record for 1986 is being compared with the one below it. Note the ditem for Year Found has dropped out of the second record, causing all the following ditems to fall under new columns... where there is a depth record of 10, that field is now empty, and the field for Year Found is now occupied by the value for Latitude.



Here's another similar example, this time for a record in 2015. There was no Depth information recorded in this record, or it was not input.



In the following record, the value for degrees in both Latitude and Longitude has been omitted, and once again, Year Found was missing. Basically the missing Year Found ditem means that this input might have originated in a spreadsheet where the column was not set up. There are more than 1200 attribute records in this map that are missing their digits for Latitude and Longitude, and they are almost all for the year of 2016.




Correcting Attribute Errors


The only way to correct the attribute data at its source is by using AutoCAD itself. Meanwhile, if you need to correct the extracted attributes for your own purposes, you can do that using a spreadsheet or a programming editor of some sort. Be aware that the DigFindR Data Utility can locate any attribute at a single mouse click, provided that the Latitude and Longitude data are correctly placed within the attribute record string, and the full fix is in place.