Speleological zoning for information-search system "Caves"
We consider speleological zoning of Russia and the near abroad, performed for the Web search engine "Caves" (currently containing information on 4 600 caves) and using to create the Atlas of the caves of Russia. When creating this search engine, the task was to build a unified system of speleological zoning of Russia to the level of regions and districts (rayons); such zoning was previously performed to the level of speleological countries and provinces only. The main difficulty was due to the fact that various criteria for the allocation of taxons were adopted in existing regional bases, and accordingly existing regional systems were very different from each other. Often, systems of taxons differed even in the number of elements. The system of speleological zoning of Russia, using in search engine "Caves", currently consists of 11 speleological countries, 52 provinces, 85 regions and more than 150 districts and subareas.