It would be nice if there was an XML schema for restaurant information.

It should include a name, a street address, a type of cuisine, the hours, information about delivery (available? minimum charge? distance?), and an external URL, at the least. This would be useful for building restaurant-hunt applications, neighborhood web sites that can list many restaurants with a consistent appearance, and so on.

An easy extension would be an additional list of URLs for reviews. These could include newspaper reviews, but could also include pointers to resources such as the King County restaurant inspections Web interface.

A more complex version could include information about menu items: names, descriptions, and prices, at a minimum. This could be used to provide a common interface for Web food-delivery front-ends, either operated by the restaurant or by aggregators who deliver for a number of restaurants.

One could also build a lunchtime-negotiation Web interface, whereby people could share their preferences and places they would refuse to eat, and the back-end could negotiate a list of agreeable choices. Though the XML wouldn’t be necessary, it would help if peoples’ preferences included price ranges and distance from their present location; also, such a service would benefit greatly from not requiring employees to update information about available restaurants.