Google Earth is a popular and widely used geographical browser. It is a standalone application that enables spatial data from a variety of sources to be displayed, explored and visually compared. Google Earth has the following important characteristics:
• Free
• Easy-to-use and intuitive user interface. Data are displayed on an interactive globe that can be rotated and zoomed to visually explore data in different regions of the world and at different spatial resolutions.
• Rich built-in data. A vast array of high resolution datasets are included with Google Earth, including aerial imagery, place names, roads and descriptive articles. Data come from a mixture of commercial data providers and more informal user-generated sources.
• Data can be loaded from local files, networks and web server.
• Support and examples. Google Earth is well supported (informally) through the vast global user community (Google report that it has been downloaded 400 million times 5).
• Relatively easy to import customised data. This document will help get you started.

What role can Google Earth have in insurance?
Google Earth does not offer any analytical functionality – it is a well-designed spatial data display and visual data exploration tool. Its power is the visual synthesis offered, in which customised, built-in, third-party spatial datasets from multiple sources can be visually inspected and visually compared. This might include the model outputs or the results of analytical work done by another tool. Data exploration and visual synthesis can help identify interesting patterns in data and between data that might assist in decision-making; for example, between hazard and exposure data. As a freely available and easy-to-use platform, it can also help communicate the rationale behind insurance decisions to different audiences. In this document, we provide a beginners’ step-by step account of how to load your own data into Google Earth for visual synthesis. We hope that this and the articles listed in the bibliography, will inspire you to be experiment and be creative about how you display your data and communicate findings to colleagues and clients.

Download pdf A Guide to Getting your Data into Google Earth