looking up chapels by their common names

Where I live, everyone refers to buildings by certain names, usually based on a nearby main street, or sometimes its city. Is there going to be a way, to look up a chapel by its common name? For example, where is the "Bernal building" near San Jose?

In Provo we have the 'Park Building' on 800 North and 100 West. It's not the stake center, but was known by that name many years before the North Park Stake was created, that was created in 1996.

Another building at 4050 North Timpview Drive is known as the 'red chapel', because of its rusty red brick color, not quite red but red enough for the building to get the name.

There are some named for neighborhoods in Salt Lake. Also, looking at maps of other cities, particularly Sao Paulo, reveal many may be named for the neighborhoods or 'jardim' areas they are in.

I assume you are referring to the meetinghouse locator feature of maps.lds.org? There is currently no mechanism for providing nicknames to buildings. The only way to identify one is by address.

But this does sound like a good feature request.

On second thought, in every case, where I live, the chapels are named by the street they are on.

jmh268 wrote:Where I live, everyone refers to buildings by certain names, usually based on a nearby main street, or sometimes its city. Is there going to be a way, to look up a chapel by its common name? For example, where is the "Bernal building" near San Jose?

This would require a database change for the underlying system (FMAT) that stores information about buildings, and would also require that this information be collected, verified, and maintained. This information doesn't currently exist in any online system -- it is simply in the collective knowledge of people in stakes around the world.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be a helpful feature, but it would be a lot of work to implement, and it seems to me that it would have very little benefit for those outside a stake (which is one of the main target audiences of the feature for looking up meetinghouses on LDS Maps) -- those in the stake tend to know their buildings by name or address. So my guess is that this would be low on the priority list of possible new features.

The first thing I searched for on the beta site is my building by name. So from this threat I would gather that people may want this feature.

Would it be hard to tie the building location to the building names in the calendar? In our calendar the building are referred as a name not a location.

james34 wrote:The first thing I searched for on the beta site is my building by name. So from this threat I would gather that people may want this feature.

That's interesting, but is your example really relevant to the intended use of the system? Any member can login and use the features for seeing their own ward and stake. That will show you your own building without the need for any lookup, and thus result in a much better experience than just trying to look up your own building.

james34 wrote:Would it be hard to tie the building location to the building names in the calendar? In our calendar the building are referred as a name not a location.

My guess is that it would be difficult for a few reasons:

• The Calendar system depends on FMAT, not the other way around.
• Your stake may refer to your building with a name instead of a location, but that is your stake's local convention. There are all sorts of different conventions around the world.
• Building names in the Calendar system can be changed whenever a stake calendar wants to change it. I don't think the LDS Maps system should look up information that is so dynamic and undependable.

aebrown wrote:That's interesting, but is your example really relevant to the intended use of the system? Any member can login and use the features for seeing their own ward and stake. That will show you your own building without the need for any lookup, and thus result in a much better experience than just trying to look up your own building.

Well how about this for an example:
My sister that lives in a different stake invites me to an event, maybe a baptism, but she doe not have the ability to access or recall the address of her building when she invites me. She could tell me the street but there are three chapels on that street. So she tells me its the Pine view building. I would then want to look up a building named Pine view near her town.

So Yes I do understand that I can find my building by logging in to the map site. But the reason I search on my buildings name is I was try to help beta test the site. If I was given the name of a chapel that I had to go to for a meeting that I have never been to before that is how I would want to search for it. I know the name of my building so searched for it to see if it would bring it up.

james34 wrote:My sister that lives in a different stake invites me to an event, maybe a baptism, but she doe not have the ability to access or recall the address of her building when she invites me. She could tell me the street but there are three chapels on that street. So she tells me its the Pine view building. I would then want to look up a building named Pine view near her town.

That's a reasonable case. Of course, it's possible that those chapels are in different stakes, and they all call their building "Pine View", in which case you won't be helped much, or might be misled. After all, local nicknames are not at all guaranteed to be unique, since they are simply conventions that have come into being over time in individual stakes, with no central database or coordination with neighboring stakes to guarantee uniqueness.

aebrown wrote:After all, local nicknames are not at all guaranteed to be unique, since they are simply conventions that have come into being over time in individual stakes, with no central database or coordination with neighboring stakes to guarantee uniqueness.

I understand that now. Being new to beta testing for the church site I had an idea of where the data might be able to come from so I shared it.

james34 wrote:Well how about this for an example:

I have another one:
A member sitting in sacrament meeting, hears the announcement of a interesting fireside in the "Newtown Chapel". They've only lived in the area for a few years, and the chapel is in another stake. How can they find out where the "Newtown Chapel" is?

I do think it would be a useful feature. Perhaps a name could be given by the "Admin" of the location in the calendar app. Searching would be a bit problematic because the names may not be unique, but perhaps a search by city & building name would work.

RussellHltn wrote:I do think it would be a useful feature. Perhaps a name could be given by the "Admin" of the location in the calendar app. Searching would be a bit problematic because the names may not be unique, but perhaps a search by city & building name would work.

I said earlier that it would be a useful feature. But no one living in an area that has a dense LDS population would think that a simplistic approach of city and building name would work. It's very common for buildings to be named after the street they are on. Some streets in the Salt Lake Valley may stretch for several miles and have a dozen or more buildings on them in several stakes. I know that one street in my city has four buildings in three different stakes.

So I like the idea, but we shouldn't underestimate the work needed to implement it in a useful way.

Just as a trial, I tried to search by the common names here. We only have 2 wards and 1 building in Owasso, OK.
Searching on "Owasso Ward" (the former name when we only had 1 ward) failed.
Searching on "Owasso Building" failed
Searching on Owasso, OK succeeded in finding our building and others in nearby communities.

For areas with less dense LDS populations, this would probably work OK, though likely not good enough for dense LDS areas as pointed out in the numerous examples and posts above.