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

 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

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

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

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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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