Database of Buddhist Temples in Taiwan

This was sent around H-Asia:

Dear H-ASIA members,

Those of you doing research on Taiwanese history and religion might be interested in our database of Buddhist temples in Taiwan.

http://dev.ddbc.edu.tw/taiwanbudgis/

What you find at this website is an interface that lets you query the location of temples in various ways, get historical information about them and access an image database. Since part of the data is also referenced in time it is possible to construct queries such as: show which Buddhist temples existed in Taipei in 1900.

The project is at the end of its second year and has one more year to add material, correct mistakes and internationalize the interface, which so far is only in Chinese.

As of April 30th, we have geo-referenced 4626 Buddhist sites. For about 1009 of these we know the foundation date. For 520 we offer short descriptions.

More than 1000 CC-licensed images are available for 130 temples. I do not know of any larger database of its kind.

Technically, the database is unexciting: it is built as a LAMP stack and makes heavy use of the Google Maps API. For those in Japan or Korea whose cell-phones can read matrix codes, we offer the locations for 1847 temples in QR-code on the website.

The raw data of this project will - very probably - be made public once the project is concluded next year.

all the best

Marcus Bingenheimer
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Director, Library and Information Center
Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC)
No. 2-6 Xishihu, Jinshan 20842, Taipei County, Taiwan, R.O.C.
20842 2-6 Tel: +886-2-2498-7171 # 2381
http://buddhistinformatics.ddbc.edu.tw/~mb/
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