A Climbing Plan Sharing System with a Document Converter for Machine-Readable Climbing Plans

In this paper, we developed a climbing plan sharing system. While climbing plan documents created in Microsoft Word or PDF formats contain necessary climbing information, a computer cannot understand such information because the information is written in a natural language. Such climbing plan documents are tedious to write, but are typically required before setting out to climb. Therefore we developed a system that converts climbing plan documents into a machine-readable format, enabling much reuse and sharing of information. We implemented functionality for sharing climbing plans among many users by displaying such plans on a Web page. Our system can therefore help climbers share machine-readable climbing plan documents, progressing the accumulation of climbing information that is difficult to effectively write and share in a natural language.