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Question Google Maps/Place hierarchy issue

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6 years 8 months ago #1 by UlfG
Google Maps/Place hierarchy issue was created by UlfG
Hello,
For some individuals in my tree, there is a difference in how place locations are displayed if they are viewed on the individuals own page, or in the "Place Hierarchy" view.
For some persons there are coordinates and links to both Google Maps and Bing maps on the Facts and Events tab for each event that is connected to a place. And these links work, and the
location is correctly shown on the maps. On the Google Maps tab for the individual, all these places are also correctly displayed on the map.

However, if I go to the "Place hierarchy" list and click on the same places that are correctly displayed on the maps on the individuals page, then these places have no location
at all on the map that is in the "Place hierarchy" page.

I find this strange and rather illogical, although I guess there may be a reason for this that I do not understand.

It appears that those individuals who have location coordinates and map links already on the the Facts and Events tab most probably had place coordinates
already in the GEDCOM file that was imported originally. The GEDCOM file was created in the "Family Tree Maker" application.

Can somebody explain this. To me it looks like a bug.

Regards

Ulf

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6 years 8 months ago #2 by fisharebest
Replied by fisharebest on topic Google Maps/Place hierarchy issue
Suppose someone was born in London, England, and the latitude/longitude is stored in the birth record.

Suppose the person was also buried in a different part of London, and the latitude/longitude is stored in the burial record.

Suppose the person was also married in London. You don't know the location of the marriage, but you do know the location of London - and you store this location in the GoogleMaps module.

You now have 3 different co-ordinates - all linked to "London, England". Two are linked to events, one is linked to a place.

We cannot draw London in three different places at the same time.

So, the place hierachy will only use the co-ordinates linked to the place.

Greg Roach - greg@subaqua.co.uk - @fisharebest@phpc.social - fisharebest.webtrees.net

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6 years 8 months ago #3 by UlfG
Replied by UlfG on topic Google Maps/Place hierarchy issue
Well, I guess this then becomes more of a philosophical (or workflow) discussion. In my world, each place is unique, and it should only be possible to have one set of coordinates for each unique place.
If one or more events are known to occur in "London", but it is not known where in London, then it is quite reasonable to have the same coordinates for all such events. If an events occurs somewhere in London
and it is known where in London well enough to have coordinates for it, then it is reasonable for that place to be specified with something more in the name than just "London", and it
should have a unique (hierarchical!) name, such as for example "Hyde Park, London", and unique coordinates. Another event occurring in another place in London with other coordinates should have another, unique, hierarchical name.

And I believe that in most genealogy databases, this is what actually happens. Each place, or at least the vast majority of places, are unique and have their own unique coordinates.
In the genealogy application that I use for local work, it is just simply not possible to create places with the same name, but with different coordinates. And I think that's typically the case
in most applications. My typical workflow is that I work in a local genealogy application, and at irregular intervals I export a new GEDCOM to webtrees for presentation on the web.
And then I have had to manually edit the hierarchy list to add coordinates for any new places added since the last export, even though I already had entered the coordinates
in my local database... Which seemed like a waste of time to me....

However, when I have now looked around more deeply into the handling of geographical data in webtrees, I eventually found a function called "Import all places from a family tree". And that
appears to do exactly what I want. It takes the coordinates out of the GEDCOM data and adds them to the place list in webtrees. It was not all that easy to find... Control Panel/Modules/Module administration/Google Maps/Geographic data
.. and then scroll down to the bottom of a very, very long list of places.... It would have been a lot easier to find if it had been at the top of the list...

However, I now think I can agree that my issue with the places is actually solved. Due to the "Import all places from a family tree" button.

Regards

Ulf

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  • thomas52
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6 years 8 months ago #4 by thomas52
Replied by thomas52 on topic Google Maps/Place hierarchy issue
If you go to Google Maps Preferences in the modules, you will see the hierarchy.
Most people will use up to four levels, as: New Orleans, Orleans (Parish,) Louisiana, USA
However there is the capability to add more levels, as: St. James Cemetery, New Orleans, Orleans, Louisiana, USA
I think what Greg was trying to say was you can only have ONE London. But you can add an additional level, as Hyde Park, and then add the lat/long for Hyde Park.
The "import all places" works fine, but you should double-check the imports to insure they adhere to your specific hierarchy.

"Failure is an amazing teacher." (L'échec est un professeur extraordinaire.)

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6 years 8 months ago #5 by UlfG
Replied by UlfG on topic Google Maps/Place hierarchy issue
I think that in principle we agree. It is just that from Greg's post I somehow get the impression that it could be possible for two different events to have different coordinates, even though they are connected
to the same place. And I don't see how that can happen, neither at the individual level, nor at the hierarchy list. It is places that can have coordinates, not events (right!?!), and one place can only have one set of coordinates.
So I don't see how a marriage and a burial that are both connected to the place "London, England" could have different coordinates, neither at the event level, nor at the hierarchy level...??
Each event is connected to a place, and the place has the coordinates... Or??

But if they can, that is, if events can have coordinates of their own, without being connected to a place, then I think that is some kind of design error. It should only be places that can have coordinates, not events.

Anyway, I find the "Import all places.." a very useful function, and since I believe that there always is (or always should be) a one-to-one relation between coordinates and places, I see no reason for not doing the
"Import all places.." operation as a default part of the GEDCOM import. It is the behavior that I would have expected, and it is the fact that this did not happen by default, that made me write this post
in the first place. I have a large number of places in my local database, but most of them have no coordinates. If I go through the process of adding coordinates to all of them in my local database, I don't want to do the same job all over
again in the webtrees database, I want the coordinates to come along automatically in the GEDCOM export/import process.

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  • bertkoor
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  • Greetings from Utrecht, Holland
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6 years 8 months ago - 6 years 8 months ago #6 by bertkoor
Replied by bertkoor on topic Google Maps/Place hierarchy issue

UlfG wrote: But if they can, that is, if events can have coordinates of their own, without being connected to a place, then I think that is some kind of design error. It should only be places that can have coordinates, not events.


Yes, each event can note different coordinates for the same place. Because it is not mandatory to specify the precise location (that is basically the address, not the place itself) as the place. You can have place being just "At sea" while the latitude/longitude pinpoints the exact location of the ship wreck where my sailing ancestor lost his life.

The design of places in the GEDCOM format leaves much to desire indeed...

stamboom.BertKoor.nl runs on webtrees v1.7.13
Last edit: 6 years 8 months ago by bertkoor.

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  • norwegian_sardines
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6 years 8 months ago #7 by norwegian_sardines
Replied by norwegian_sardines on topic Google Maps/Place hierarchy issue
As far as I remember.

The GEDCOM and google maps coordinates do not interact with each other.

The GEDCOM PLAC tag (place) has a subtag with latitude and longitude attributes.

3 PLAC
4 MAP
5 LATI
5 LONG

These tags do not provide the data to the Google Maps nor are they used by many GEDCOM providing programs.

Also the PLAC data is not normalized which means that each place in the GEDCOM can have multiple LOG/LATI values for the same location, which is very problematic inmy view.

Therefore webtrees has a database (separate from GEDCOM) that support the Google Maps option for map point rendering.

In my database I have thousands of places and each place has its own map coordinates in the Google Maps option database. I take these place locations down to the specific gave marker or street address.

If several persons were buried at the same grave, I'd enter the marker number, in each PLAC tag in the GEDCOM and enter only once the coordinates of the grave in the Google Maps database.

Ken

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