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Generating odometry information from a camera or depth-sensor like a Kinect is an incredibly difficult problem. Vslam is an attempt to generate visual odometry data from a stereo-camera setup. The Kinect can provide you with the same information as a stereo camera system, in that it publishes an image and a depth map. I believe there have been attempts to use vslam with the Kinect before, but I'm not sure what kind of reliability people have been getting.

Building a 3D obstacle map using SLAM and gmapping can easily be done with the Kinect, however. You can find an example here.