One problem with this as a demo is that the way you've outlined it, it's not linky, and that means that you're handicapping REST by taking away one of its major benefits over RPC. A better demo would be one that handles several different kinds of related things that carry references to each-other (i.e. something that would make at least a tiny moderately-connected UML class diagram). The only opportunity I can see for linking in the current model is between users and landmarks. I'm guessing that you're planning on using a unique string (e-mail address? URL?) to identify users, rather than managing them as bona-fide objects.

(Bit off topic. About those unique ID attributes. The elements with the CLASS attribute applied to them do not have them.)

(Eventually, there will have to be another method to add landmarks,but let's not worry about that now.)

I wonder why this needs to be different from the "Where I am" function. Couldn't the landmark be the "I"? That would make for a nice simple API (I might be thinking too RESTian, though.)

Thanks, Anne, that's fixed now.

Yes, the "where am I" function could be overloaded to handle landmarks, I guess. Though I had in mind slightly different "parameters". For "where am I", I just need to provide some indication of who I am and a latitude and longitude. For the landmark, I might also want to provide a description and perhaps a URI.

Best of luck with this Norm, it looks to be a very informative experiment, and I for one will be following it closely.

Although it looks like you're going into this with a pretty open mind with the intention to learn rather than evaluate, I suspect that others will not necessarily feel the same way. I'm including myself here: I have a predjudice towards RESTful architectures (admittedly based on very little experience) and am expecting to see your RESTful API "win" in some sense.

Just something to be aware of, which you probably are anyway.

For that added complexity, how about letting a person or landmark have a set of properties? Then you could ask questions like "who of my collegues are currently reasonably close to work?" or "which mountaineers are currently up a peak?".

I'm a bit sceptical as to wether I would be interested in using the service, though ...

Interesting experiment! It would be cool if you could include features such as message level security (e.g. I'll email an encrypted message containing my location to some gateway) ...