The Places of Worship dataset is composed of any type of building or portion of a building that is used, constructed, designed, or adapted to be used as a place for religious and spiritual activities. These facilities include, but are not limited to, the following types: chapels, churches, mosques, shrines, synagogues, and temples.
The license free Large Protestant Churches, Mosques, Jewish Synagogues, and Roman Catholic Churches in Large Cities datasets were merged together to create the initial data for the Places of Worship dataset. Additional entities have been added from TGS research.
This dataset contains Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Judaic, and Sikh places of worship. Unitarian places of worship have been included when a congregation from one of these religions meets at a church owned by a Unitarian congregation. Some Protestant denominations are not currently represented in this dataset.
The Places of Worship dataset is not intended to include homes of religious leaders (unless they also serve as a place of organized worship), religious schools (unless they also serve as a place of organized worship for people other than those enrolled in the school), Jewish Mikvahs or Hillel facilities, and buildings that serve a purely administrative purpose.
If a building's primary purpose is something other than worship (e.g., a community center, a public school), but a religious group uses the building for worship on a regular basis, it was included in this dataset if it otherwise met the criteria for inclusion.
Convents and monasteries are included in this dataset, regardless of whether or not the facilities are open to the public, because religious services are regularly held at these locations.
On 08/07/2007, TGS ceased making phone calls to verify information about religious locations. Therefore, most entities in this dataset were verified using alternative reference sources such as topographic maps, parcel maps, various sources of imagery, and internet research. The [CONTHOW] (contact how) value for these entities has been set to "ALT REF".
The website <http://www.gettochurch.org> was used for verification during processing. As of August 2009, this website is no longer active.
Records with "-DOD" appended to the end of the [NAME] value are located on a military base, as defined by the Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure (DISDI) military installations and military range boundaries.
"#" and "*" characters were automatically removed from standard fields that TGS populated. Double spaces were replaced by single spaces in these same fields.
Text fields in this dataset have been set to all upper case to facilitate consistent database engine search results.
All diacritics (e.g., the German umlaut or the Spanish tilde) have been replaced with their closest equivalent English character to facilitate use with database systems that may not support diacritics.
The currentness of this dataset is indicated by the [CONTDATE] field. Based upon the values in this field, the oldest record dates from 07/20/2007 and the newest record dates from 08/04/2009
Use Cases: Use cases describe how the data may be used and help to define and clarify requirements.
1. A disaster or health emergency has occurred, or is predicted for a locality. Places of worship or congregations that may be affected must be identified.
2. An assessment as to the evacuation needs and issues for a given area needs to be made as part of a disaster mitigation plan. Places of worship that may need to be evacuated must be identified.
3. Facilities that can serve as shelters must be identified.
4. A threat has been made toward places of worship and other religious institutions. These locations need to be identified, their leadership contacted, and their buildings protected.
TGS PinPoint® v.1.11
Metadata written using TKME by Peter N. Schweitzer (U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA 22092) version 2.9.17 <http://geology.usgs.gov/tools/metadata/>
Metadata tested for compliance to FGDC-STD-001-1998 and converted to HTML using MP version 2.8.25 by Peter N. Schweitzer (U.S. Geological Survey) <http://geology.usgs.gov/tools/metadata/>
ID Check: The [ID] field is not blank and each of its values is unique.
Coordinate Check: Coordinates are not null or zero and the [X] and [Y] fields match the shape.
Basic Address Check: Physical addresses were verified to be non blank and to not be a "PO Box", "General Delivery", "Highway Contract", or "Rural Route" address.
Highway Address without Type Check: Physical addresses containing the word "Highway" or "Route" were verified to also contain a type designator such as "State", "US", or "County", if one actually exists for the highway or route. These type designators are often missing from addresses, leading to confusion if more than one "Highway" of the given number exists in an area.
Basic Name Check: Entity name is not blank, is not the same as entity city, and has a minimum of two (2) characters. Name does not contain punctuation characters that can interfere with database operations, such as " (quote) and * (asterisk).
City Check: Entity's [CITY] field is not blank, and entity is located within 25 miles of its tabular city as found in the NAVTEQ Named Places reference file.
State Check: The entity is located within its tabular state.
County Check: The entity is located within its tabular county.
FIPS Check: The tabular FIPS Code matches the entity's tabular county and tabular state.
County in Name vs. Geographic Location Check: If an entity's [NAME] field contains the word "county" or "co", the same county value should also be in the entity's [COUNTY] field.
Basic Phone Check: All phone numbers (including the area code) are ten (10) numeric digits. Alphabetic characters have been converted to the corresponding numeric digit.
NPA_NXX Check: Area codes (sometimes called "Number Planning Areas", or NPA's) and central office codes (sometimes known as exchanges, or NXX's) were validated against data from the North American Number Planning Administration (NANPA). In some cases, NPA-NXX combinations did not show up in the NANPA data but were verified to work.
Area Code Distance Check: The entity's area code (NPA) is valid, and the entity is not more than 25 miles from its area code boundary, as defined by data from the North American Number Planning Administration (NANPA), unless TGS has previously verified that the phone number rings to a headquarters location or otherwise does not ring to the entity's location.
Zip Code Check: The entity's zip code is five (5) or nine (9) numeric digits, is listed in the postal database, is in the same state as indicated by the entity's [STATE] value, and is not a PO Box only zip code.
Zip City Check: The entity's zip code and its city were verified to match according to the USPS Address Information System (AIS).
Zip Code Distance Check: The entity is located within 25 miles of its zip code boundary, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau's 1999 Zip Code file.
NAICS Code Check: The NAICS field is not blank, the NAICS Code is one of the accepted codes for this layer, the NAICS Description is an acceptable Index Entry for the NAICS Code, and certain key words in the entity name do not conflict with the NAICS Code.
Collocation Check: Entities with different addresses must not share the exact same geospatial location.
Geographic Spell Check: Words that appear in the entity name were checked against a standard English word list (and Spanish word list for entities in Puerto Rico). Words not appearing in these standard word lists were then checked against names appearing in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) of geographic features that are located within 25 miles of the entity. Proper names were manually reviewed for correct spelling.
Supplied Coordinates Distance Check: Entity is located within 3 miles of coordinates supplied by the original source.
The Places of Worship dataset is not intended to include homes of religious leaders (unless they also serve as a place of organized worship), religious schools (unless they also serve as a place of organized worship for people other than those enrolled in the school), Jewish Mikvahs or Hillel facilities, and buildings that serve a purely administrative purpose.
If a building's primary purpose is something other than worship (e.g., a community center, a public school), but a religious group uses the building for worship on a regular basis, it was included in this dataset if it otherwise met the criteria for inclusion.
Convents and monasteries are included in this dataset, regardless of whether or not the facilities are open to the public, because religious services are regularly held at these locations.
Records with "-DOD" appended to the end of the [NAME] value are located on a military base, as defined by the Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure (DISDI) military installations and military range boundaries.
2) NAICS Codes and NAICS Descriptions were assigned based on the entity name, web research, and the type of data sources that were used to create the database.
3) Four (4) digit United States Postal Service (USPS) zip code extensions w ere assigned based on the USPS Address Information System (AIS).
4) County names and FIPS Codes were assigned through a spatial join.
5) All text fields were set to upper case.
6) Leading and trailing spaces were trimmed from all text fields. These spaces can interfere with some database queries.
7) Non printable and diacritic characters were removed from all text fields. These values have been found to prevent data from being loaded into some spatial database engines.
Sometimes an entity may report a city that is not accepted by the USPS, and although TGS has tried to replace those cities with an acceptable alternative, some of them may remain in this dataset.
The values in this field were assigned by TGS based on the source of the entities gathered in each dataset. TGS added records were populated after processing by using the [NAME] field.
Some values in this field were provided by individual sources. Other values in this field were assigned by TGS, where applicable, based on the source of the entities gathered in each dataset.
The values for this field were provided by individual sources and TGS did not verify these values.
The values for this field were provided by individual sources and TGS did not verify these values.
The values for this field were provided by individual sources and TGS did not verify these values.
These values were determined in part by the source data and also by technicians during processing.
These values were determined in part by the source data and also by technicians during processing.