It’s been awhile since we’ve written on the Mapufacture blog. That’s because we’re busy finishing up a number of great additions to Mapufacture and projects using Mapufacture. The team is all gathered out in San Francisco for several conferences and high-bandwidth brainstorming and development. While the tools like instant messaging, IRC, wiki’s, and code repositories make location-independent teams possible, nothing is better than physical proximity to solidify ideas and efforts.

In a couple of weeks we’ll be demoing at the OGC Technical Committee Meeting on the power of mixing OGC WMS interfaces with KML visualization and large GeoWeb datasets. It’s been an interesting, and enlightening 6 months working with the OGC on standardization and advancement of the KML. There have also been a number of discussions in the larger geo-community on Atom links to OGC services, OpenSearch-Geo interfaces to KML and pagination link within KML. We’ve been adding these quietly to Mapufacture and in the near future we’ll have more information on why it’s useful.

We’ve also been working with a number of really great projects in advising and building their collaborative mapping solutions. These are really grass root projects that need to easily bring together data from a variety of sources and systems, and then visualize these and share them back out. With Mapufacture we’re showing them how easy this is, and doesn’t disrupt their workflow, but actually fits into it.

We’re also slowly improving the user experience of finding data and building maps in Mapufacture. We want it to be easy for non-GIS experts to easily build geospatial visualization, so understanding the expectations and workflows has been interesting. We’re always looking for more feedback and will soon be opening some community tools for more Mapufacture users to share their experiences and ideas. You can also always ping us at human@mapufacture.com for immediate feedback.

Happy Mapping!