This is an entirely non-commercial activity. I am in no way trying to make money from this site, but rather it is intended as a thank you to the geocaching community of Ottawa. I may expand this to other locations if there is a demand. The site itself is hosted through a hosting service based in California. This is not a dedicated box, so availability should be high, but performance will vary throughout the day and night.
Caches and owners are ranked according to a bayesian rating scheme. Bayesian ratings will account tend to reduce the rank of caches with only a few ratings. For example, a cache with 5 ratings that average out to 4.5 will be ranked ahead of a cache with a single rating of 5. It will also tend to push caches (or owners) with large numbers of below average ratings further down the list. A good introduction to bayesian rankings can be found here. Ties go to higher average rating followed by most ratings. Once we have a decent base of ratings, caches may require a minimum number of ratings to get a rank.
Event caches and CITO caches are not tracked. Archived caches may be rated, but they do not count for the rankings and are given a tied rank for the active cache with the previous bayesian value.
Caches may be rated as being winter or child friendly. A cache will be rated overall as being winter friendly, if 80% of the people who rated it's winter-friendliness said it was winter friendly.
If you are finding the UI overly cluttered, you can hide your rating information using the 
icon.
You can hide the friendliness icons (winter, child, etc.) using the 
icon.
Uploading gpx files adds caches to the database (and updates existing caches), but it also places uploaded caches into your uploaded caches area. By clearing this area and uploading, you can use the upload facility as a sort of scratch area for caches you want to rate.
The site is still a work in progress, so I'm happy to receive your ideas and see if they can be put into action. Send your feedback to webmaster@geocacherating.ca. Also, if you want to contribute your web development skills to improving this site, I'd be happy to hear from you.
Groundspeak has agreed to allow me to use their data via uploads of pocket queries under a formal data licensing agreement. Groundspeak has the right to terminate this agreement as they see fit, and at that time all data related to geocaches (and their ratings) may be deleted on short notice. Use of Geocaching.com data is subject to the the Geocaching.com Terms of Use Agreement located at: http://www.geocaching.com/about/termsofuse.aspx. Groundspeak Pocket Query uploads permitted under Data License Agreement with Groundspeak Inc.
