We’re pleased to announce that Mapufacture has been selected to participate in the “OGC OWS-5 Testbed”. You’ve probably seen news of this already if your read Andrew’s blog.

The OWS-5 is a standards activity involving many companies and research groups, organized by the Open Geospatial Consortium, and in particular Mapufacture is working in the “Agile Geography” thread — a pretty decent term to describe the “simplest thing that works” approach of maps hacking, or neogeography, or whatever you want to call this movement of turning geography on its head. We’re in discussion on the future of KML and will likely be implementing some new infrastructure that crosses the domains of the heavy duty and lightweight geospatial web.

For developers, we hope this makes Mapufacture a more useful component in the geospatial web toolkit. We’re particularly agnostic on the specifics of technology — we want to see things that work to create a richer infrastructure for geodata, and whether that’s GeoRSS, KML, WFS, REST, WMS is not the crucial thing.

For users, we hope this participation and implementations will make it quicker and easier to get things done without worrying about those details — whether it’s mapping locations of berry patches and mushroom spots in the forest, for sharing with your trusted gathering-compatriots, or sharing orca sightings with researchers across the North Sea.

Another great appeal of participating in the OWS-5 is the new approach to communication in a standards process. We’re making efforts to make the process as transparent as possible, and Andrew’s blog is the place to read and participate. And we’ll make posts here on the OWS-5 when there’s significant developments to Mapufacture.