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.