Written in VB5.

The official South African Snails database was previously only available on more than 17,000 handwritten cards dating back as far as 1950. The information on these cards where collected from areas all over the country by qualified field workers. Such a large card-based collection is simply inaccessible to many snail researchers.

The first part of the project was to develop a data-capturing module. The information on the cards was entered into the database (and verified) over a period of 12 months. During this same period, the rest of the application was developed. This consisted of two modules:

The query builder module is used to query the huge database in a very user-friendly manner. The query result is displayed in a spreadsheet grid for export to other applications. The query builder is really the heart of the application and enables researches the make advanced queries on the whole collection. See figure 2.

The GIS module displays the result of the query builder on a map of South Africa. Nearly all queries are location based and the GIS module is then used to mark these locations on the map. See figure 3.

It is also possible to generate temperature, rainfall and altitude maps. See figure 4.

The maps are all vector based and can therefore be printed on any size paper at very high resolution.

A lossless zoom function with panning is also available to give the user a powerful GIS tool. See figure 6.

Snailbase Examples

The main window showing the different modules.

The GIS module with a rainfall plot

The query builder module.

The GIS module showing the results of a query