I agree that opening up the "coordinates correction" functionality for members to verify their own household(s) is a great idea. To clarify, I think the clerks and other leaders should be able to still maintain privilege to the feature as well, as some members will never verify their own location and somebody needs to do it. The clerk-approval step is an interesting proposal and could be helpful.Mikerowaved wrote:Since each member using the service must identify themselves with login credentials, why not allow them to do the verifying/repositioning for their own address? Who knows their own house from an aerial view better than the one residing there? If CHQ has a problem with this, then at least let each user submit proposed changes to their local leadership for approval. A clerk can then double-check it was done correctly and set it in stone. This would be far more efficient than researching each address from scratch.
New maps beta now available!
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Mikerowaved wrote:Since each member using the service must identify themselves with login credentials, why not allow them to do the verifying/repositioning for their own address? Who knows their own house from an aerial view better than the one residing there? If CHQ has a problem with this, then at least let each user submit proposed changes to their local leadership for approval. A clerk can then double-check it was done correctly and set it in stone. This would be far more efficient than researching each address from scratch.
I think that is a good idea, and I concur that the update may need to be filtered through clerks.
But it can't be the primary method, because ultimately it is a clerical responsibility. More practically, only a minor subset of the ward is 1) active enough to care, 2) motivated enough to log in, and 3) educated enough about this technology.
As I understand this, the goal is 100 percent of addresses with verified locations. We probably won't hit that (we don't even have 100 percent valid addresses). But we need to get as close as possible.
Speaking of clerical responsibilities, the introduction of this mapping function will underscore the need for clerks to standardize and validate the street addresses in MLS. Geocoding is a classic example of GIGO in action, and the address data in many MLS units is pretty dirty.
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Great point. Although, what would you suggest for a ward that is literally 350 yards x 300 yards and has over 250 MLS households, the entire ward being made up of townhomes?RussellHltn wrote:Careful. Having the dot in the center of the roof is great for looking at a satellite photo, but driving directions needs to be thought about. Once you take a dot off the street, the driving directions will look for the closest street. Since the computer doesn't know about fences or other barriers, it may take you on a route that makes you cut though someone's yard - if it's even possible. BTDT (and followed the GPS).
Do I try to move the dots as close to the street as possible while still attempting to mark where they live? Or perhaps I just consider "driving directions" a ridiculous notion for our situation?
Not applicable to our situation, but hypothetically, how do you place the dots for households in apartment complexes where members can be at the same coordinates but on different floors of the building? Perhaps at some point this general Church solution may not fit your needs?
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The geocoding done by this new solution will require much manual correction for our ward, as everything clumps along the streets and both mapping providers (Microsoft and Google) don't have the latest streets nor satellite imagery of our community. I don't think this means my addresses are deficient, but just that they prove difficult to geocode with the proximity of all the housing and the missing street data.boomerbubba wrote:Speaking of clerical responsibilities, the introduction of this mapping function will underscore the need for clerks to standardize and validate the street addresses in MLS. Geocoding is a classic example of GIGO in action, and the address data in many MLS units is pretty dirty.
I have made every single address consistent in format, namely of the form 11 S 1100 W (this is a fake address).
Is my understanding correct that there isn't much more I can expect the geocoding software to do? Or is there something I should be doing to the addresses for better accuracy?
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I missed this explanation in the Help file of the beta maps that explains what would happen in the case of apartment buildings like I described:mkmurray wrote:Not applicable to our situation, but hypothetically, how do you place the dots for households in apartment complexes where members can be at the same coordinates but on different floors of the building?
Several households may be grouped together in one location by LDS Maps such as an apartment building that has one address.
A group of households is represented on maps and satellite images by the icon below. It is larger than the icon representing an individual household and has a white border around it.
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mkmurray wrote:Great Not applicable to our situation, but hypothetically, how do you place the dots for households in apartment complexes where members can be at the same coordinates but on different floors of the building? Perhaps at some point this general Church solution may not fit your needs?
The way the app handles that is with "Groups," which typically would be one location per apartment complex in a low-density ward like mine. That mirrors the way common geocoding works: The lowest level of automatic granularity is usually the street address, so multiple households in an apartment complex all map to the same point.
So any mapping application has to deal with the problem of multiple records mapping to the same point, which this app solves with the "Group" concept. I think it works well conceptually, much better than what Google Maps does by default. (Google Earth, a standalone application, automatically generates dynamic group icons that expand when they are moused over.)
There is a manual step necessary in the editing of these Groups, and local leaders seem to have discretion in defining them. (I should think that really dense wards, such as student wards in Provo, might require special treatment with greater granularity.)
In the case of apartment complexes in my ward, the Group names seem to need manual editing to strip the arbitrary apartment number from the name. The app does not seem to try parsing that out automatically. But I think that would need editing only once for each apartment complex. Different apartments would be grouped automatically under that because they would geocode to the same lat/lon.
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mkmurray wrote:In the interface, how do I mark a household as verified at it's current or new location?
In the panel on the left listing the households, click on the icon representing an unverified record. You should get a pop-up giving you the option to Move, Verify or Edit.
If you are not seeing that behavior, perhaps there is a problem with LDS Account authenticating your calling credentials. It happened seamlessly for me.