Stake / Ward Boundry GIS in Google Earth

I apologize in advance if this is the wrong place to ask this!

I've been assigned in our Stake to head up the oversight of several boundary changes due to population growth. I already have all of our membership mapped out onto Google Earth, but I want to know if there is any way to get a digital copy of our Ward boundaries. I plan on overlaying this into Google Earth so that we would be able to quickly see at a glance who would be effected by the changes so that the Presidency can make informed decisions based on this information. Is this a question for clerk support instead?

Has anyone utilized Google Earth in this manner? This information has greatly influenced our home teaching and emergency preparedness programs as it is much more valuable than a ward roster when geography and proximity are of a concern. The days of pin-maps are long gone!

I don't know anything about digital versions of the ward boundaries. But here are some threads I've seen regarding online mapping API's and the like:

[thread=37]Using Free Mapping API's for Meetinghouse Locator[/thread]
[thread=141]Ward Maps[/thread]
[thread=179]Using Web Tools to Map the Members[/thread]
[thread=255]Geocodes and MLS[/thread]

Hope those help in some way.

Excellent, thank you. It's nice to see that others are doing the same thing I've been working on. One piece remains however, the ward / stake boundaries in a digital form for layering into a GIS system. I have a phone number for the church GIS department but I never seem to have time to call them during office hours. Once I get a hold of them I'll post my results here.

For our stake I've just used our written boundary definitions (and printed maps) and plotted out each vertex point using Google Maps API to find the latitude/longitude and turn it into a GPolyLine - I assume you can do something similar with Google Earth. It really doesn't take too long if you have it set up so you can click on a point on the map to extract its latitude/longitude. In Google Maps the following code does it:

(in your load() javascript function:)
and then in the body:

Regarding the thread about viewing ward boundaries, I am in the process of relocating due to a new job. Several current ward members have family in the new area so I am asking for recommendations regarding which ward to attend based on my children's ages. Sure would be nice if I could see a map with boundaries so I only look at properties within the boundaries of the ward I wish to attend.

Only place I've heard of is LDSagents but I'm looking to rent during the 2 year relocation and they do not get involved in rentals.

By the way, I've used GPS in my car for years, both a Garmin GPS V and MS S&T with a Holux USB receiver. I organized my stake list in Excel/Open Office and imported into S&T. I could select which people to visit and have S&T tell me the most efficient order to visit them in. I could have said I wanted to visit the entire 2700 family stake starting and ending at home and it would have figured it out.



Sjefferds

Calcualting the most effective route to all of those members is likely to be beyond the capabilities of your GPS for some time yet. It's one of the well known computer science problems out there, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling ... an_problem for more info.

BenM99 wrote:Calcualting the most effective route to all of those members is likely to be beyond the capabilities of your GPS for some time yet. It's one of the well known computer science problems out there, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling ... an_problem for more info.

You are certainly correct in principle. But finding the optimal route to a small number of stops is feasible. (I don't know about routing to a huge number of stops like 2,700.)

An elegant implementation of a solution to this problem is demonstrated on this web site, which the developer calls OptiMap.

The web site will find a guaranteed optimal route for up to nine stops. Beyond that, it would hit the combinatorial math limit you correctly reference, so it falls back on a heuristic approach that finds a useful route, but not the route absolutely guaranteed to be optimal. This application enforces a limit of 24 locations. Drill down in the links on the page to see the algorithms explained.

OptiMap uses the Google Maps API to compute over-the-road distances. (For as-the-crow-flies distances, Google Maps would not be needed.) So for some of our own real-world applications, such as computing fast-offering-routes, it would be technically doable to use such methods.

Streets & Trips, MapPoint, and other desktop mapping software do a respectable job at optimizing routes with multiple stops -- I've done routes upwards of 20 points without needing to do major overhauls of the order, using the "optimize route" features.

borenmt wrote:Streets & Trips, MapPoint, and other desktop mapping software do a respectable job at optimizing routes with multiple stops -- I've done routes upwards of 20 points without needing to do major overhauls of the order, using the "optimize route" features.

I know that the routing algorithms in MS S&T have a good reputation. I don't have a copy, because for other reasons I don't think it fits my needs. I have been evaluating DeLorme Street Atlas USA Plus, which also does automatic routing, but I haven't had much need to use that feature yet.

boomerbubba wrote:I know that the routing algorithms in MS S&T have a good reputation. I don't have a copy, because for other reasons I don't think it fits my needs.

I've used MS S&T for several years and find it can be very useful as a stand-alone product, but with no API support it's a brick for programmers. (I guess MS wanted to save that feature for their more expensive MapPoint product.)

Mikerowaved wrote:I've used MS S&T for several years and find it can be very useful as a stand-alone product, but with no API support it's a brick for programmers. (I guess MS wanted to save that feature for their more expensive MapPoint product.)

My needs would involve importing multiple sets of names and addresses already geocoded, and a robust facility for printing these plotted maps at various zoom levels, along with an itemized legend. I couldn't find anything in the MS marketing stuff leading me to believe S&T would do this, so I bought a trial copy of the DeLorme product, which might be forced to do much of it.

I will keep it, but with reservations. It has a lot of functionality, but the interface is complex, non-intuitive, inconsistent and downright maddening. There is no API. As a niche product it does have some loyal power users adept at inventing workarounds. Some of DeLorme's hard-copy maps look quite good -- including a 36" X 48" wall map I made for our missionaries. I don't like its proprietary file formats. But any company that has built The World's Largest Globemust know something about geography.

Neither company's product is very expensive, considering.

For APIs, some of the best tools seem to be web-based, with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft competing in the same space. But licensing is a jungle. You can do a lot for free, but soon you run into somebody's pay-to-play business model, which gets expensive fast.