Google Earth

Lots of non-profits are using Google Earth to tell their stories. You can read here about some specific groups' goals, challenges and best practices, and the overall impact of visualizing their work in Google Earth.

^{Google Earth puts a planet's worth of imagery and other geographic information right on your desktop. View exotic locales like Maui and Paris as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, schools, and more.}

Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings and even explore galaxies in the Sky. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places and share with others.

So someone who is capable to obtain a Scud missile and launch it from a ship needs Google Earth to do this? They can't just send someone with a GPS system to walk around the stadium to get the coordinates? Or use a good old-fashioned Sextant (if someone asks you can always claim to be practising for your nautical exam ;-))? Or just buy a few very detailed maps?

A PROVINCIAL revenue agency down in Argentina is using Google Earth Pro to find tax dodgers. With this approach, the taxman for the Buenos Aires province detected 1184030 square feet of undeclared property.

A list of alleged debtors is published by the provincial Public Revenue Service on the web, but as is usual in him, he pressed for more. Google's Earth Pro subscription allows the agency to import site plans and property lists, and export high-quality images. It also allows to transfer "up to 2,500 locations by address or geospatial coordinates from a spreadsheet" and includes measurement tools -square feet, mile, acreage, and the like- by point and clicking on the screen.

Santiago Montoya, is described at a Columbia University web page as the person responsible for "instituting tax policies that ultimately facilitated financial recovery". He has served as Secretary of the Department of Public Revenue of the Buenos Aires province since 2001, and said last week that by using Google's satellite images and Google Earth Pro, they were able to identify 362 undeclared finished houses and 284 construction sites, all spread in four exclusive gated country clubs, plus 157906 square feet of undeclared constructions in the open flea market known as La Salada. All these undeclared constructions amount to around half a million dollars in unpaid Property Tax. In Argentina the tax-levying power is shared by the Federal and Provincial Governments, and Property Tax is collected by the B.A. province.

Some critics of the tax man -specially at local paper La Nacion who represents the voice of the wealthy elite- were quick to point out that Google's satellite imagery for Argentina is less detailed and in some instances not updated as often as those for the Northern Hemisphere, saying that Google Earth's images can be "up to three years old". That claim just gives more reason to the tax man's argument with regards to tax dodging, as nobody could say that they "forgot" to declare a luxury house at a gated country club for the last three consecutive years.

The use of various Google tools to present information for societal benefit seems to be picking up steam. Google's acquisition this week of Gapminder is certainly in line with offering tools such as Google Earth for social issues. It seems Google is developing a suite of tools that can be used by the public sector.

Just download the file and when you double-click on it, Google Earth will open and pressing the play button will then start it. If you have it installed of course!

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