[Ldsoss] Ward Boundaries

[Ed Ashton]

Currently the church has two GIS analysts/technicians that work on upkeeping 
all boundary changes up to date.  They work on a few other projects but, yes 
the church does have the boundaries for all the units in the world (or they 
are working on drawing them out).  In any event, the only way you can get 
the official boundaries is have your stake president make a request to 
church hq.  Then the GIS department will send the stake president a jpg of 
the stake with the boundaries mapped out.  However the last time I talked 
with the GIS department they have been instructed by the brethern not to 
realease this information to anybody but stake presidents.  However if you 
can get the jpg you could use a georefrencing program like 
http://research.microsoft.com/mapcruncher/ to plot out the boundaries. 
(Haven't used mapcruncher, need to verify that user is not uploading picture 
to public view)

Also to note, now that http://wardmap.theballfamily.org/intro.asp has been 
closed down there have been other alternatives. Such as 
https://www.moregoodfoundation.org/wardmap/ by Richard K Miller 
<richardkmiller at gmail.com>.  In this mashup none of the membership 
information is kept by the site.  It is being dynamically displayed.

For a more focussed use you could download many of the opensource GIS's out 
there and map out the boundaries yourself.  Search QGIS or Udig, or download 
a 60 day trial version of ArcView from Esri.

Ed Ashton


From: "Jay Askren" <jay.askren at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Ldsoss] Ward mapping application

Along the same lines, I'm working on desktop app which shows a map of the
ward and where everyone lives.  I use a Yahoo web service to geocode the
addresses, and then I use Geotools(http://geotools.codehaus.org/) to display
the map.  One thing I would really like to add to my maps are the ward
boundaries.  I would need the ward boundaries encoded as a shape file or at
least in some digital format, so that I could convert the data to a shape
file.  Is there any chance that the church has this data and that an open
source developer could get access to it?

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