Fellowship One Maps

Our pastor of connections recently mentioned that he would like to see a map of all our people so we would know how we were distributed geographically.

I had been wanting to construct a Perl package for accessing Fellowship One (F1) through Data Exchange and this offered a great excuse. I now have a working package for querying F1 (no updates or inserts yet). I will likely make this available to other F1 users in the not-too-distant future.

There is a really cool SOAP service called Geocoder.us that makes it really easy to get latitude and longitude based on an address.

I had hoped to use the Google Maps API, but alas, their terms of use require that the results of your usage be made freely accessible by the public. I'm guessing that making that type of information available would not be a good thing. What do other people think about that?

So, I went to CPAN and discovered a handy dandy Perl package called Image::WorldMap. The image you see is a highly zoomed and cropped version of the image made by Image::WorldMap, using coordinates from families with last names starting with "GL." I will need to hack Image::WorldMap to use a Lenawee county map. Since I have the source, that should be pretty straightforward.

Fellowship One Data Exchange is very cool.