Geo URI proposal
A couple of years ago I floated the idea of a geo: URI scheme. You give each physical location on the planet an address and then leave it up to individual users to define what happens when they click on a geo: URI. One person might have their browser configured to open Google Earth at the appropriate spot while someone else might prefer to use whatever mapping is available from Open Streetmap.
True to form I didn’t do much with the idea but Alex Mayrhofer and Christian Spanring (who I’m certain came up with the idea absolutely independently) have written a draft specification for a geo: URI scheme and implemented a FireFox extension to handle geouris.
My original proposal involved a packed representation of latitude and longitude. My thinking was that if you could encode, say, someone’s home address as a reasonably short string then people might have a reasonable chance of remembering it. On reflection though Alex and Christian’s daring use of conventional latitude and longitude makes much more sense…