Fellowship One Maps
February 8, 2006
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.
February 9, 2006 at 9:18 pm
very cool brian. I too think that data exchange is a very cool untapped resource in F1. It is great to see people thinking along the same lines.
February 13, 2006 at 11:23 pm
This is cool stuff. I want to also dig into F1 Data Exchange. Seems like you can do a lot with it. Keep up the good work!
February 14, 2006 at 9:38 am
keep up the good work Brian!
March 26, 2007 at 7:43 pm
This is a very cool idea! I am new to f1 and am looking for ways to implement data exchange. When you are ready to release this please let me know.
May 28, 2009 at 12:35 pm
I would love to have access to your map-creating program! Would you be willing to let me know if you make it more publicly available?
May 28, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Sorry, I no longer have access to F1 and fear my old code would have code-rot. I think the F1 guys would also be unhappy with me as all their protocols are protected by an NDA.