ST-Rays: A Google Maps-based Geospatial Tool
to Cross-analyze Urban Services and Tax Payments
Alfio Costanzo
Department of Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering, University of Catania,
Viale Andrea Doria 6, Catania, 95125, Italy
Keywords: e- Government, e-Payment, e-Democracy.
Abstract: From the Public Administration point of view, the local tax payment is the basic condition to implement
suitable urban services for the citizens. However, from the citizen point of view, control tools that measure
the quality of the services offered at urban scale are also requested to verify the correlation between taxes
and services. Therefore, tax control and payment facilitation methods should be implemented to increase the
yield of the taxes, as well as transparency and accountability, but also deeper information on the status of
the services should be given to plan possible service quality improvement. Aim of this paper is to show an
e-government tool to inform the citizens, using a Google Maps interface, on how much to pay depending on
her/his properties and use or to inform the public offices on the proper and timely actions to solicit the tax
payment of citizens in arrears. Also, the tool supports statistical inquiries to visualize the payment degree
for an area chosen by authorized users by issuing the name of the district or the road of interest, or by
sketching the zone contours directly on the display. Also, the tool allows the user to visualize for the chosen
area the offered services to assess how their tax is being spent and to express their feedback.
1 INTRODUCTION
From the Public Administration point of view, the
local tax payment is the basic condition to
implement suitable urban services for the citizens.
However, from the citizen point of view, control
tools that measure the quality of the services offered
at urban scale are also requested to assess how their
tax is being spent. Therefore, tax evasion control and
payment facilitation methods should be carried out
to increase the yield of the taxes, but also deeper
information services should be implemented to
inform citizens and public managers on the quality
of the available public services, and possibly to plan
their improvement.
In the paper we take into account the case in which
tax payment at local level depends, as in Italy, on the
correct proportioning of the tax amount to be paid
with respect to the consistence and use of the taxed
entities, e.g., the citizens’ real estates. This
computation is not so easy since it depends on the
integration of many data that reside on the data
stores of different departments of the Public
Administration (PA), e.g., personal data residing on
a Municipality Data Base (DB) should be linked to
the cadastral data, i.e., data dealing with ownership,
boundaries, and value of real property.
Let us note that several works are available in the
literature dealing with geospatial data for land use
management as well as for providing volunteered
geographic information, e.g., (Coleman , 2009) and
(Ganapati, 2011), whereas few solutions deal with
the taxation, e.g., the projects named Elisa
(Engineering, 2010) and K-Metropolis (Costanzo,
2012a) promoted by Italian Research Programs. The
former approach is centralized, whereas the latter is
distributed, but both these solutions are based on
data integration technologies to transform data
codification from proprietary formats to standard
vocabularies, also called ontologies, e.g., (Faro,
2003) and (Zhai, 2008). A discussion on this theme
is outside the scope of the paper and may be found
in (Giordano, 2013).
Aim of this paper is to show a tool, called ST-
Rays, able to visualize on Google Maps the tax
payment status of the citizens so that they may be
informed on how much to pay depending on their
properties or to solicit the tax payment in arrears.
Statistical inquiries are supported by the tool to
visualize the payment degree of an area chosen by
393
Costanzo A..
ST-Rays: A Google Maps-based Geospatial Tool to Cross-analyze Urban Services and Tax Payments.
DOI: 10.5220/0004404603930397
In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2013), pages 393-397
ISBN: 978-989-8565-54-9
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
authorized users by giving the name of the district of
interest, or by sketching the zone contours directly
on the display. Also, the tool allows citizens and
public managers to visualize for the chosen area the
available services, e.g., the bus frequency, the
number of students that can be hosted by the schools
divided by the number of potential students resident
in the selected area, the location of the containers for
collecting waste. ST-Rays collects feedbacks from
citizens to measure the offered service quality.
Sect.2 presents the architecture and the
characteristics of the proposed tool by pointing out
how it may be executed on either the urban server or
the user mobiles to carry out timely control of the
services quality and tax payment. Sect.3 illustrates
the main use cases dealing with specific information
on the due payments and with thematic maps about
the available service status for a zone identified by
name or by sketch.
2 ST-Rays MAIN FUNCTIONS
ST-Rays is currently a module of the K-Metropolis
system (Costanzo, 2012b) aiming at supporting the
e-governance of a metropolitan area as well as
citizens mobility and logistics. Fig.1 points out how
the tool interacts through the K-Metropolis
functionalities with the relevant databases of PA,
e.g., a) the cadaster DB dealing with ownership,
boundaries, and value of real property, whose XML
format is described in fig.2, and b) the municipal
data archives. The K-Metropolis monitoring systems
are not only used to support urban mobility and
logistics, but also to collect geospatial data on the
urban life such as pollution, waste collection and
traffic congestion to measure the main urban
services. In this architecture, the authorized end
users (i.e., PA offices and citizens) may ask the ST-
Rays resident on the Urban Server to check tax
payments and the urban service status.
ST-Rays informs the users using JQMobile
scripts (David, 2011) directed to their PCs or
mobiles.
The results may be displayed also by a
software, consisting of Flash Builder scripts (Corlan
2009), resident on the mobiles that is able to collect
the data entering into the mentioned XML databases
directly without the server intervention.
In either the ST-Rays version implemented on
the server or in the one resident on the mobile it is
possible to visualize on a familiar interface based on
Google Maps the situation of the payments and the
status of the urban services.
This will allow the PA managers to have a better
view on the tax payments and to do statistical studies
for selected areas, whereas the citizens may monitor
their tax situation, as well as they may have a
general view of the quality of the urban services
with respect to the zones where they live.
Figure 1: Architecture of the K-Metropolis system
including the tool ST-Rays: relevant DBs, end users (on
the left) and system administrator (on the right).
Figure 2: XML scheme of the database of the cadastre.
Also, the mobile version of ST-Rays allows the
urban policemen to make inspections while they are
walking, and the citizens to control the services
offered as soon as they see some anomalies, e.g. the
birth of an illegal waste dump. The citizens may also
express their feedback about the quality of the
available services using their mobiles so that the PA
managers may avoid inconveniences and improve
the overall service quality.
XML
DB
XML
DB
XML
DB
DBs of the Public Administration, e.g.,
Cadaster and Municipal data bases.
Urban
Server
Google
Maps
Flash
Builder
ST-Rays
software
resident
on Mobiles
Zone 1
Node
Zone n
Node
XML
DB
XML
DB
XML
DB
Monitoring
Systems
ST-Rays
JQMobile
Interface
to ST-Rays
resident on
the server
END
USERS
System
Administrator
WEBIST2013-9thInternationalConferenceonWebInformationSystemsandTechnologies
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3 MAIN USE CASES
This section illustrates four main use cases: a) the
Public Administration carrying out checks on the
payments done from the citizens residing in a certain
road or administrative zone, b) a citizen seeking the
information characterizing his/her real estate taken
from the cadastre, c) two queries by sketch to either
check the tax payment and the status of the urban
services and d) the statistical representation of the
service quality of a given service for planning
suitable actions to improve services.
Fig.3 shows the situation regarding the payment
of taxes highlighting with a red marker the locations
where there are people who have not yet made the
payment and with a green marker, instead, those
who have already done so. In this way one can have
a territorial vision of tax evasion control.
Figure 3: Detailed view of the payment status of the
citizens residing in a certain urban zone.
The public office can check in detail the payment
situation of an individual building, as shown in fig.4
where all the relevant information of the citizens
resident on that building under check are displayed.
Figure 4: Detailed view of a local tax payment of the
citizens resident in a given building.
The data shown in fig.4 have been obtained by
linking the cadaster information to the related
Google Maps addresses. This linking allows each
individual citizen to control their tax payments,
calculated on the basis of their cadaster situation.
The mentioned check may be carried out by
using the query by sketch technology. For example,
fig.5 illustrates how the software resident on the
mobile may support a search by sketch to facilitate
the monitoring of the areas that share some urban
functions although they don’t belong to the same
administrative zone.
Figure 5: Search by sketch to monitor the payments
situation of an area freely chosen by the user.
From the citizen point of view, it is important not
only to report any abnormal event or to transmit
their feedback but also to know if all the services
offered in the area of their interest are functioning
correctly.
For this reason, the tool allows the citizens and
the district administrators to have a general vision on
the service status by visualizing on their mobiles all
the service units of a certain service typology, e.g.,
the schools of a district, featured by red, yellow and
green icons (see fig.6). In this way it is quite
immediate to recognize the situations that require a
specific intervention (red icons), the ones that should
be taken in serious account (yellow icons), and the
ones that are featured by positive feedbacks (green
icons).
Finally, at urban level, the tool offers the
thematic representation for each service to find
differences on how the chosen urban service is
provided in the districts of the city (see fig.7). In
particular, the thematic map point out the average
score of the separate waste collection clustered by
colors: good (green), sufficient (yellow), insufficient
(red).
ST-Rays:AGoogleMaps-basedGeospatialTooltoCross-analyzeUrbanServicesandTaxPayments
395
Figure 6: Status of the schools in a given area clustered by
colors: good (green), sufficient (yellow), insufficient (red).
Figure 7: Thematic maps of the average score of the waste
collection clustered by colors.
4 CONCLUSIONS
A tool has been illustrated to allow the PA offices
and the citizens to carry out controls using a Google
Maps based interface about local tax payments and
the status of the urban services with the main aim of
reducing the payment arrears and to improve the
quality of the urban services. Although the tax
payment is a sensitive issue, it is more and more
joined to the theme of the quality of the urban
services, as suggested by the proposed ST-Rays
approach inspired by e-democracy schemes that
balance duties and rights. For this reason, ST-Rays
belongs to the class of the novel e-services offered to
the citizens to widen, as envisaged in (Faro, 2011),
the services offered from the urban information
system that, until now, are mainly devoted to
mobility and logistics assistance.
From the technical point of view, the main
advantage of ST-Rays is the one of responding to the
user requests by accessing directly the remote DBs
where the relevant data reside, i.e., cadaster and
municipal databases. Also, the mobile version of ST-
Rays allows citizens and policemen to be always
informed on urban taxation and service status using
any type of mobile. A version based on Quantum
GIS is also under development to study the taxation
software as a module of a more general urban GIS
(Giordano, 2013). A comparison of the Google
Maps and Quantum GIS based versions as well as
the evaluation of the user interface is for further
study.
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