A seating reservation system running on a network server has functionality that can be trained to detect information relating to individual seats, their locations, and different seating types in a new or modified seating plan loaded into the system. This detected seating information can be maintained in seating plan files that can be edited to include metadata. Upon request, by a client application running under control a user, portions or all of the information in a seating plan file can be transferred as a web page to the client application for display and interaction with by the client application user for the purpose of completing a seat reservation process.