Pondering Waypoints

Since I’ve become interested in geocaching, I’m realizing that there is a large set of people who are going around waypointing places with their recreational-level GPSs. Most of these points are geocaches which they are setting up, but there is no reason this energy couldn’t be turned into citizen-produced maps of favorite places and points. There are signs this could be starting to happen: for instance Travel By GPS is a site with a number of sightseeing and outdoor recreation routes and points of interest available for download. Another promising development is the emergence of a standard interchange format for the routes, tracks, and waypoints stored by recreational GPSs.

A culinary application comes to mind. I’d like to see such efforts tied in with restaurant recommendations that people post to websites, their own or others. Compiling such recommendations is a favorite example of how the semantic web might work. Perhaps the day when one can go to a website, read through an aggregated set of comments on Thai restaurants in the East Bay, check off the ones that sound good, and then download these as waypoints for one’s GPS isn’t that far off.