For GPS Users

As an example, the data held by somewherenear must be useful as sets of data points for someone who wants to navigate their way around pubs, curry houses, restaurants and all the other things we've got in the database. At the moment there isn't a general interface to query the datasets held (there are many other calls on our time), but to start with here is an experimental waypoint generator for the curry house information. It's supposed to generate something suitable for use as a Garmin .wpt file but it hasn't been tested yet, so feedback would be most welcome (see the comments link at the foot of the page). THERE IS NO WARRANTY ABOUT ANYTHING ASSOCIATED WITH THIS DATA! In particular, although the download alleges that the reference datum for the lat/long positioning is WGS84, it's actually OSGB36 which is likely to be some tens of metres off in terms of absolute accuracy.

We'd really like to add an interface so that other datasets can easily be uploaded into the search engine too. Exactly how to do that hasn't been thought through well enough yet, but here is the thinking so far:

• Registered users should be able to upload datasets identifed as owned by them.
  • Should users have more than one dataset? Probably
• Those datasets should be marked as private or public
  • If they are public, how should they be viewed? Integrated into the 'official' category hierarchy or not? Separate 'special' URLs?
  • If they are private, ditto? How can they be used by anyone else?

If anyone wants to supply some test lists of data (hopefully useful ones!) then a start can be made on the upload process. Nothing has been written to do that, but odd half-hours are available in the evenings to have a play and start refining the process.

That sounds a bit half-baked. It is. There must be clever things that can be done with this, but the thinking has only just been started.