Stefan Geens of OgleEarth wrote up an interesting comparison of Google’s recent “collaborative mapping” feature and other tools like Tagzania.

In the end, he posits that neither solution is quite perfect, but suggests a solution.

Ideally, we’d have a tool where an owner is in charge of a map to which anyone can contribute their own placemarks, no-one can alter others’ placemarks, and where the owner can weed out the spoilsports. In Tagzanian parlance, that would be the equivalent of “owning” a specific tag name, and being able to disallow inappropriate placemarks from using it. Neither Tagzania nor Google Maps gives us that kind of tool at the moment, but Tagzania’s comes closest to what we need.

Well, this is a feature supported by Mapufacture, and in fact a primary aspect of the benefit of a geospatial aggregation system.

Users can generate their KML or GeoRSS with whatever tool they want: CMS, Blog, Platial, MyMaps, Tagzanize, and the map “curator” can import everyone’s feed/document.

Then users can each update or alter their own feed and these edits will be consumed by Mapufacture.

Mapufacture doesn’t currently support single editing by a curator of individual items, but they can remove or hide individual feed sources. And of course, they could also take the aggregated GeoRSS or KML document from Mapufacture and drop that back into MyMaps or something else and then modify things that way.

That’s the nice thing about these open standards, it allows users to choose how they want to mix and match their data with the appropriate tools.