Google Maps Layers – My Maps for Buildings and Temples?

Filed under: General Technology Tools, Perfect the Saints, Redeem the Dead

16 Jan

So I keep hearing about these nice new layers on Google maps to find stuff (Weather, Gas Prices). Anyone have any idea how hard it would be to add a layer to Google maps of Church stuff like buildings, and temples with schedule information on it? I know the church has meetinghouse locator, but the results are in a list format. Sometimes it is easier to visualize.

I posted a similar entry last week about mapping the ward membership and received a good tip from Darrell. I followed his directions using batchgeocode.com and was able to import a map into Google Earth and export it into a .kml file, and import it into Google Maps. It worked great. I guess the hardest part would be getting all the information about where all the buildings/temple are located… does anyone know if that is public knowledge? I would love to create the map and make it public…

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4 Responses for "Google Maps Layers – My Maps for Buildings and Temples?"

Bryan Hinton January 17th, 2008 at 3:11 am 1
Jeff – this would probably be a good post to put on tech.lds.org to get people’s input there.

As for the location data outside of the meetinghouse locator I don’t think the data is readily accessible.
Darrell January 17th, 2008 at 7:28 am 2
When I moved to the DC area, I used this website to choose a place to live based on where the meetinghouses were:

http://www.cumorah.com/

Specifically, I used their atlas:

http://www.cumorah.com/atlas/north_america/united_states.html

They have international maps, too. I don’t know how updated these maps are, though.

The http://www.cumorah.com website doesn’t get as much traffic as I would think it would/should. Maybe it is due to the late 90’s web design…
Virgil Zetterlind January 17th, 2008 at 10:40 pm 3
There is a thread at the Google Earth Community with links to Google Earth KML files for most of the temples:
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php?Number=50410
I agree that I would tend to prefer searching a map vs the current text-based meetinghouse locater.

I also built a batch geocoder for mapping my ward’s membership to KML while in the EQ presidency to help bring some order to managing home teaching routes. I set some simple rules so that the location icons indicated the head-of-household priesthood level. It was very interesting to see the spatial distribution of members across the ward and that just about all the active families had a less-active member ‘neighbor’ or more within a block or 2.

Living in NW Florida, mapping member households is pretty important for hurricane contingency planning. During the Katrina cleanups, traditional direction services (such as mapquest) were mostly used to create printouts for the work parties. I’m hoping next time, we’ll be more prepared with things like Google Earth / Google Maps as the satellite perspective really helps when the street signs are gone.
Jeff January 18th, 2008 at 10:43 am 4
Thanks for the links Darrell and Virgil. Two great resources!