placeto

Placeto is a term encountered in discussions of geography, GIS, and routing to describe the directional relationship from an origin place to a destination place. It is not an official standard term; rather, it appears as a shorthand used in texts and forums to refer to a specific journey or path between two places. The word is a portmanteau of “place” and “to.”

Definition and scope: As a concept, placeto denotes the pairing of two places and the route or connection between them. In practice, it can be represented as a route object that includes origin coordinates, destination coordinates, distance, estimated travel time, and the mode of travel. It may also refer to the abstract idea of moving from one place to another within a spatial network.

Representations: In software and data models, placeto can be modeled as a function placeto(origin, destination) that returns a path or journey. This path can be a sequence of waypoints, a graph path through a street network, or a summarized route with segments and attributes such as travel time and cost.

Applications: Placeto is used in routing algorithms, travel planning, logistics optimization, and mapping interfaces to describe and compute journeys from A to B. It supports tasks like shortest-path calculations, multi-modal routing, and user-facing direction generation.

Variants and relation to other concepts: Some writers use “place-to” or “place-to-place” interchangeably with placeto. Origin-destination is a broader term common in traffic engineering and econometrics, of which placeto can be considered a more informal or implementation-specific instance.

Limitations: The term placeto lacks formal standardization, so its precise meaning can vary by context, system, or discipline. See also origin-destination, routing, and navigation for related concepts.