What began as the pet project of a few enthusiastic users has grown into a corporate-backed initiative demonstrating Google Earth's potential as a live-saving humanitarian tool.

The Crisis in Darfur project is a downloadable set of layers for Google Earth which combines high-resolution satellite images of Darfur with photographs and first-hand accounts of the genocide currently underway in the region. Users of Google's 3-D world atlas can zoom in on burned-out Sudanese villages, read the stories of the victims and see stunning arial shots of massive refugee camps in Eastern Chad.

While the data in the Crisis in Darfur project was available before the project's birth, it was spread out in a variety of formats and stored different places the web.

"There's a tremendous amount of data out there, but most of it doesn't interact very well," says Declan Butler, a senior writer at Nature and one of the early volunteers in the The BrightEarth Project which developed the download package.

Butler worked with a team of volunteers to bring together disparate data from the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International and photographers and journalists working in the region, turning it into interactive layers for the free program.

"Google Earth allows you take data from lots of different sources and mix them together easily – anybody can make these files," adds Butler. "Google Earth is really like a browser and adding layers is like making a webpage."

The initial concept was the brainchild of Michael Graham, now head of the Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Graham says his team had an "aha!" moment when Google Earth was released in June 2005. He quickly saw the software's potential to help humanitarian teams spread information about evolving crises more rapidly.

"Why should organizations like the U.N. or aid organizations have to spend days creating and disseminating individual maps whenever they want to contribute to the 'situational picture'?" asks Graham. He cites the ability to quickly build new maps from layers of information as one of the program's strongest features.

In creating the Crisis in Darfur project, Bright Earth and the Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative hope to demonstrate the usefulness of Google Earth for use in non-profit aid work. In fact, as more groups turn to the popular visual-mapping tool as a way to raise awareness of their causes, Google has decided to formalize their efforts into a new Google Earth Outreach program. The company will use the program's website, which launched Tuesday, to promote the layers created by non-profit and public-benefit groups.

Now, aid groups responding to crisis events in remote areas, such as the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, are eyeing Google Earth as a potential life-saving tool.

"Satellite imagery and other remote sensing material has been used in relief efforts for a while now," says Paul Currion, creator of Sahana, an open-source software tool used to manage large-scale relief efforts.

However, he says, the non-profit community "hasn't yet realized the full potential of this technology."