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.