Last few days I made some really awesome progress on Maps and Semantic Maps. I fixed a whole variety of issues all over the extensions (to many to list here), and refactored quite some code to decrease code redundancy. A notable change to the exertions structures is the adding of a settings file, which contains a list of global variables that you can use to configure the default values for a variety of things, like the default zoom level for a map. I did this after a great suggestion of Sergey Chernyshev, author of the Google Geocoder extension, in a reply to an email I send to the SMW dev mailing list with the source code of my extensions.
There is still some work left before the first release, but I hope to have it finished by the end of this weekend. The most important things still on my to-do list are rewriting the Google Maps form input (hook for Semantic Forms), by letting it use the vastly improved and more centralized code since when I created it, creating form inputs for Yahoo! Maps and Open Layers and fixing an issue with the text in marker popups.