Google Map for interactive islamic prayer time calculations: first beta released for testing

The modern muslims are getting used to using a religious software and information services (e.g. sms) to get a right time for prayer (salat), that is regarded as an important part of muslim’s life.
Accurate calculations of muslim prayer times for every location is a non-trivial task, because the time of prayer depends on the sunrise and sunset times and geographical location. The sunset and sunrise is different in different locations and change throughout a year. Historically, prayer timing was determined by Islamic religious scholars and the prayers were informed about start of a prayer by the muezzin from a minaret.
Now in the most of modern cities there it is difficult for muslims to hear an azan (call to prayer) that makes alternative way of informing prayers about prayer timetable more and more important.
One possibility is to use Azan Islamic software for mobile and PCs, sms azan services that created a market for religious software developers. With the start RSS era this service became available globally for free. It only requires an RSS reader (such as IE 7.0) and hence can run on virtually any PC, PDA, cell phone and any other computer device.
To help muslims finding locations they live in or going to visit remaining informed about correct prayer timming now they can use Google maps.
At the moment the tool has a limited functionality. The Google Maps interface lets a user to drag the marker, representing the prayer's geographic position, to the required location and click on it to request a calculation. A user is to provide the time zone information (GMT offset) and indicate if the daylight saving time has to be employed (see Namaz Prayer Times Calculation Method Reference). Single click to the "calculate" button redirects to the results of the calculation.
In a few days Pray In Time is going to add geographic location interpretation (country, region and a closest habitable place identification). As Pray In Time Islamic Information Center develops into a full featured location-based Islamic Information Directory, Pray In Time Islamic Information Center invites users to provide islamic resources information for inclusion on Worldwide Interactive Muslim Map.

Salat (also salah, namaz, solat, solah, solaat, solaah, salaat, namaaz and other spellings) (Arabic: صلاة, Qur'anic Arabic: صلوة, Persian: نماØning to pray, or to bless, generally refers to prayers that Muslims offer to God (Arabic:Allah) and most commonly refers to the five dailyritual prayers in Islam. It is one of the Five Pillars of Islam in Sunni Islam, and one of the ten Branches of Religion in Shi'a Islam. As such, it is compulsory (fard) upon every Muslim. It is quite commonly known with the Persian word namāz (नमाज़ نماز) in Iran auth Asian languages such as Urdu, Hindi and Turkic languages
Adhan (Athan, Azaan, azan and other spellings) (أَذَان) is the Islamic call to prayer, recited by the muezzin. The root of the word is ʼḏn "to permither derivative of this word is uḏun, meaning "ear". Adhan is called out by the muezzin from a minaret of a mosque five times a day (Sunni Islam) or three times a day (Shi'a Islam) summoning Muslims for fard (mandatory) salah (prayers). There is a second call known as iqama that summons Muslims to line up for the beginningof the prayers

Name Abu Yusuf
Organization Pray In Time Islamic Information center
Address: Bayerstrasse 31, 80335, Munich
Zip code 80335
Tel: +49 89 975 - 5 79 06
Fax: +49 89 975 - 5 79 06
e-mail:office@pray-in-time.org

Pray In Time Islamic Information Center presents the first public BETA version of its Google Maps based interactive namaz prayer times calculation tool.

This release was published on openPR.