I've been working on a cemetery since 2006.
I have poured over tons of documents, located burials(marked & unmarked), verified plot ownerships and photographed 1000's of cemetery monuments.
I renamed my about 3000 photos using lastname-space-firstname-space-date of death . JPG.
I still have a couple thousand more pictures to rename.
Hyphenated names were renamed twice to ensure either name will bring up the correct monument.
I've spreadsheeted all this data along with SPC coordinates, deed references for deed ownership, additional burials for each owner of record(for his plot), along with obituaries(when available) and information on the casket/vault location and depth(when available). There's even more data than this.
Most of this data has been reduced to a large TerraModel drawing and now I'm looking for a way to make this data best deliverable to my clients . . . aside from a hard-copy, which I will deliver.
I've tried findagrave and have downloaded tons of data to them, but the pictures and spreadsheets are not compatible as such.
I'm wondering if GoogleMaps, or some other on-line program might be available to download this data so anyone can get it? When I look at Googlemaps, it doesn't really look like the viable option I had hoped it would be.
not sure exactly how you want this to appear but you could save each point as a kmz file and attach the photo to it. I am sure someone must be able to do this automatically, then when someone opens the kmz file it opens in google earth with the photo attached to it
Another thing to be aware of is the over all size the KMZ will be for the final product. Especially with all the attributes you are going to have associated with the file. Google Earth tends to be slow when loading large KMZ files.
But Google earth will probably be the best final product to deliver.
You could do a trial run of a few locations to see if it does what you want and the workflow needed. I'd be concerned about the final product, though, given the proximity of one grave to another. If you want to send a chunk of your db, I'd take a whack at make a file out of it...
Andy
My brother is a GIS guy up in Northeast Wisconsin. On the side, he put together a website for a small cemetery near here. It may give you some ideas:
check this out:
Google Earth Spreadsheet Mapper
you can basically use an excel spreadsheet and google fusion tables to make a custom KML with photos and data that appear in the "info bubbles"
within google earth. I think you can also have it "linked" to an online google map
This should work for exactly what you want to do.
The company that I used to work for has a cemetery GIS software. You can check them out at CIMS. Not sure on their pricing or your needs.
-G
I think you would like Google Earth as a base. One of the nice features is that after you import into your places, if you use the last name as a point title, you can search your places for the name, and it will list the matches, then you click on the matches and Google Earth will "fly to" the location. Seems like a perfect way to deliver this to the clients in a way they can easily make use of it. The downside would a congestion of "point nodes" and possible slowness due to the size of the files.
