A lot of information is out there for sailors. One important thing these days is waypoints, so you can program a possible route ahead of your trip (and possibly mark danger areas) in the hope wind will take you there. There are a couple of source fow waypoints : do it yourself, get a map and try to get a waypoint from it, buy a book with waypoints or get some from the internet.
It would be coolest to have a database with waypoints, with an feed created from it. The feed should contain new entry or a feed should be provided from a planned route or the waypoints from a certain area, all most likely collected by sailors. To actually make this work, importing those waypoints should be provided for most widely used gps systems, or making it a standard so people can adjust their application to use such feeds.
Another important improvement will be changing the messages to sea going people (in dutch berichten aan zeevarenden), which in Holland, they just moved it to use the internet. It would be better to have these messages in a standard feed, so updates can be provided automatically.
Have tried to find some standards on this, but didn't come up with much. (geoURL is close though).
If you know of any standards, let me know, it will save time reinventing the world ;)
Posted by mvdb at January 25, 2003 02:20 PM