We are incredibly thrilled to share the news that FortiusOne is acquiring Mapufacture. You can read more about the news at HighEarthOrbit, the FortiusOne blog, and Brain Off. Here is the official press release.

We have a history of working closely with the team at FortiusOne. Together we share a common vision of building the pieces of the GeoWeb with free, accessible data and easy to use geospatial tools. They recently released GeoCommons Finder! that enables easy sharing of KML, CSV, and Shapefile data, and will very soon be announcing more pieces of the GeoCommons suite.

By comparison, Mapufacture has been focused on tying into the dynamic geoweb of syndicated data and web services. We’ve built adapters to many social and map making sites, as well as generally gathering up the available GeoRSS and KML that has been emerging and providing interfaces to find, visualize, and access these in a variety of formats.

Together, FortiusOne and Mapufacture will be able to push the concept of freely, and easily accessible federated geospatial data - and easy to use tools for advanced map-making and collaboration. The team at FortiusOne could not be better - they are rock stars, GIS-wizards, and all excited about really pushing out the technology.

Building Mapufacture has been an incredible experience. What started out as a project to demonstrate an index of a new format called GeoRSS grew into a company that effectively demonstrated geospatial aggregation and provided free mapping tools to organizations and individuals around the world.

Mapufacture.com will remain active for the near future. At some point we’ll begin offering users the option to migrate their accounts and data to the GeoCommons suite.

Thank you to our users, supporters, and partners. We’re looking forward to continue building the GeoWeb together.

At Mapufacture, we have been continually pushing out the boundaries of the GeoWeb and exploring new territory. Linking together complex geospatial data along with lightweight-dynamic GeoRSS and KML and then combining these together using new technologies for visualization and access on GPS and mobile devices.

However, in the push to utilize new technology and electronics, there are times when older solutions work best. For example, while traveling through China last December, I didn’t want to use my mobile phone to access the expensive, or often unavailable, GSM network to pull down maps and data. I also couldn’t easily share a digital map with friends or taxi-cab drivers.

To answer issues like this, we began exploring the incredible versatile medium of paper. Good old paper that is foldable, writable, shareable, and reproducible. We spent several evenings brainstorming under the wise influence of Aaron Straup Cope, who works at Flickr, but has a rich background in print. The idea was to use PocketMod style foldable booklets, but feed it with geographic data and maps.

The result are PocketMaps. Just like normal PocketMods, but each item in a map or KML file show up as page with a marker and map showing the location. If the place has a photo from a sharing site like Flickr then the image will be brought in as well. You can even optionally have simple map of the place, or include overview, or zoomed out, maps of the area to help you find where it is in a large city.

As an example, you check out this PocketMap for PodCampDC (pdf). If you haven’t used a PocketMod before, they are simply sheets of paper split into 8 areas, and require a single cut and folding to turn into a 1/8th page booklet. You can even fold several sheets of paper together for a bigger booklet. There are folding instructions here.

Really, we’ve been working on PocketMaps for awhile - since Fall ‘07. But dealing with the intricacies of dynamic, geospatial, user-generated digital data and easy interfaces for generating quality maps has been difficult, and we’re working hard to get it right. I hinted at them in my presentation at Where2.0. However, despite our efforts to quietly test and try out PocketMaps, Hackszine (and then LifeHacker) picked up on the new feature and showed it off. They called in the anti-iPhone, which is an intriguing idea as well.

We’re continuing to improve both the PocketMap generation tools as well as the actual PocketMaps. It would be great to combine these maps with other information such as itinerary, travel details, and more. There will also be the option to change the underlying map providers to match the Mapufacture map or other map styles as appropriate.

And if you’ve read this far - then there is an added bonus. We built the PocketMod and PocketMap libraries on Aaron’s excellent Perl code, and his PHP PocketMap tools. However, being Ruby developers we decided to rewrite it all in Ruby - so you can grab the PocketMaps open-source library on GitHub.

This morning, Business Week published an article, Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes:

GeoCommons, OpenStreetMap, and Mapufacture are three online hubs where people can collaboratively map areas, which could help in emergencies

Read the full article.

Discussing the recent hurricane in Myanmar, as well as the well-known issues around the power and failure of geodata and maps in response to Katrina in New Orleans and areas - the article gives a quick impression on the utility of the applications we’re all building to be useful in disasters, recovery and response. As Jesse points out, there is still a long way to go. Many have remarked on the great demonstrations that emerge from news of a disaster, and the benefit they have on awareness of events. However the next important step is putting these tools in the hands of responders.

We’ve been fortunate to work with the UNJLC as well as InSTEDD in employing tools that have immediate implications to responders and hope to work with more organizations in the future.

More recently at Mapufacture, we built a map to aid in tracking the progress of the fire and evacuation centers of the Santa Barbara Gap Wildland fire.

Last fall we participated in the exploration and standardization of KML in the OGC as part of the OWS-5 testbed. The culmination of this effort was demonstrating some of the key features of KML 2.2, integration with other OGC Web Services (hence the OWS), and the broader GeoWeb.

Mapufacture volunteered to put together a demonstration use and screencast for illustrating this that we presented at the summary session of the three day TC (Technical Committee) meeting. The following video is a 3-minute demonstration using KML and the other tools in Mapufacture to create a “Personal Decision Support System” to help find an apartment and office space in San Francisco. It brings together both complex geospatial data such as Census Demographics of Median Age (as a WMS from GeoServer), as well as user-generated content from Craiglist (via a Yahoo Pipe to generate a GeoRSS feed), news from Topix, and events from Upcoming.org.

The resulting map is then viewable on a mobile phone via uLocate’s WHERE platform as you actually travel around to view the suggested listings. We even took it a step further showing an example of using Socialight to leave geolocated notes and attribute information such as number of rooms that is then dynamically brought back into the map and can be used for decision making and visualization.

Mapufacture Demo - Personal Decision Support from mapufacture on Vimeo.

The video is slightly technical, but gives a good, quick overview of the power of linking together various data sets form both qualified sources as well as user-generated content to aid in decision making and collaboration.

At Mapufacture, we have created a lot of tools to make it easy for users to build and share maps. It’s not always easy to provide powerful tools in intuitive interfaces. And while we’ve definitely seen some really terrific maps created by people, we also understand there are others who may encounter problems with knowing how best to use the site, find interesting feeds and services, or even (gasp!) bugs.

To help assist the community, we’ve teamed up with GetSatisfaction, the next generation of customer service and support, to host our support forums. At our GetSatisfaction site you can share your thoughts, frustrations, successes, and suggestions with the Mapping community.

Beyond just Mapufacture.com, we’ve also included forums for some of the other tools we build, such as the GeoPress blogging plugin for MovableType and WordPress.

There is also a sidebar on our blog where you can see the latest discussions and search our forums. We hope that users sharing with each other we can all build on ideas to make better maps. So if you’ve had problems adding interesting layers to your map, or linking in your personal geospatial streams from blogs, Flickr, or any other tool - please let us know. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

As many may be aware, the football/soccer tournament Euro2008 is currently being played in central Europe. EuroKickoff offers up a Calendar and API for accessing the games.

I imported this feed into Mapufacture to make a map of the events. You can even filter the events with the Mapufacture time sliders.

Euro2008 Map

BlinkGeo pointed to this terrific article The Great Health Mashup.

It summarizes the benefits of aggregating and visualizing multiple geospatial data streams together to aid with awareness and decision making. In this specific case, it is used to monitor health conditions - but the same ideas and technologies can be applied to numerous other domains.

In fact, these tools become really powerful when you merge together disparate data sets. As the article points out, overlaying weather and ambulance tracking, both aspects of a health crisis that may otherwise be overlooked or difficult to access as a health care advisor. They even combined in user content, though in the form of polls. A system could also make use of distributed, web or mobile based reporting and aggregated.

There have been other similar reports by the World Health Organization on Public Health Mapping and GIS, and there is the HealthMap global disease alert map. Verner Vinge’s novel Rainbows End began with just such a scenario where school kids found an outbreak of a lung disease based on a drop in work attendance, traffic, and rise in ambient temperature. This sounds far-fetched, but the article points out where “by aggregating their mapping data, officials were able to forecast West Nile virus activity by dead bird clusters.“.

The power of these tools is exactly what we’re building with Mapufacture - the ability for non geospatial experts to combine dynamic, and potentially complex geospatial data for visualization, analysis and collaboration. Additionally, the output of these tools should be shareable - the aggregated data offered for other applications and organizations to bring into their systems.

It is incredibly exciting to see the benefit of geospatial aggregation realized and utilized in such important domains.

We’re proudly sponsoring the OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map, this July in Limerick, Ireland. You should totally go.

Last year was the first SOTM, and that event fully assured me that OpenStreetMap was in good hands, many good hands, and here to stay. Now so much happens with OpenStreetMap, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with everything, so SOTM will be an intense immersion. Schuyler and myself (Mikel) will be talking about our experiences with FreeMapIndia2008.

Mapufacture.com supports OpenStreetMap as a map option through Mapstraction, for a start, and there are all sorts of more interesting potential integrations. So we’re happy to give back and sponsor SOTM. And it’s really neat to see our little 128 pixel logo over there!

When designing Mapufacture it’s a continuing challenge to provide users with understandable and easy to use interfaces for building maps and finding interesting data sources. The primary concept of Mapufacture is that you can choose an area of interest, and then add data feeds to your map as layers.

The most common difficulty we see is that lots of people are creating maps but not adding any layers. We recently released a number of improvements to Mapufacture, the primary feature being much improved map and layer editing.

Now you can edit your map and add new layers all within the same view of your map. This should make it much easier to quickly make changes without having to go to a new page.

To start, click the “Edit Map” menu on the right-hand side, and choose “Add Layers”. You’ll see a new panel underneath your map with a number of options. Based on your map location, title, and tags Mapufacture suggests several feeds that may be interesting. There is also a list of your Favorited, or bookmarked feeds.

You can also use the Search box to look for other layers based on any keyword, and even limit searches to feeds that correlate with your map’s location.

If you like a feed, click on the title, or the feed [+] sign to add it as a layer to your map. Click “Save” and you’re map should be updated.

You can also quickly add any data source to your map while viewing the feed using the “Add this feed to a map” quick select in the “Share” section.

We’re definitely interested in hearing from you on your thoughts about the new interface. Does it make finding feeds and layers easier - or is there something else we could do?

To let us know, check out our new GetSatisfaction feedback forums where you can ask questions and give feedback about Mapufacture and other tools we help build and support.

Last week I attended the OGC Technical Committee meeting in St. Louis, Missouri closing up the OWS-5 testbed. More on that soon.

The OGC has different types of groups: Domain Working Groups (DWG) and Standards Working Group (SWG). Where SWGs are very formal, and working on defining a specific standard, such as WFS, a DWG is a more broadly scoped discussion about an area or application space.

One of the DWGs we participated in was the Mass Market (MM) DWG. Ed Parsons shares his thoughts on the benefits of the MM-DWG. Namely, to track standards and trends that are occurring outside the OGC, especially outside GIS-specific domains.

So for the session, I put together a presentation briefly outlining some of the very recent happenings in standards: REST, AtomPub-geo, OpenSearch-Geo, GeoJSON, and GeoRSS-Multi.

These formats have been very successful in their development and adoption. GeoRSS was one of the first and took awhile, but is now supported by most of the major mapping libraries and many GIS tools. GeoJSON and other formats have seen a much quicker adoption (GeoJSON is still ‘going 1.0′ but already used by Yahoo Pipes and FireEagle).

One of the big reasons these formats are so popular is that geo-developers worked to add geographic capabilities to already ubiquitous standards (e.g. RSS, Atom, JSON, OpenSearch) instead of trying to create a geographic specific format and redesigning the system and bringing people to them (e.g. SLD, WFS, GeoRM).

We’ve been tracking and help to put together a number of these agile geography formats with the rest of geo-community and also keeping a mind to what’s already been developed outside of the Geo world.

The OGC is starting to engage the non-geo community by championing how GML can be the geographic markup within other standards such as GeoPriv, GeoRSS (non-simple) and so on. This is the right approach, though GML is still too heavy for your average non-geo developer to just pick up and easily add into their toolset.

Mapufacture utilizes a number of these formats. We’re huge proponents of supporting and sharing data via standards - especially ones that encourage broad adoption. It allows customers and developers to more easily integrate with your software and data sets. This is especially true since we’re working with non-GIS experts who want to utilize their common tools for building maps; whether they are spreadsheets, wikis, or RSS readers.

The slides are very XML oriented - keeping a mind to my audience.