Using Google Earth for Remote Collaboration in Archaeology

Peter FERSCHIN¹ / Andreas JONAS¹ / Iman KULITZ¹ / Dietrich RAUE²

(¹Vienna University of Technology, Institute of Architectural Sciences, Digital Architecture and Planning, Austria / ²German Archaeological Institute, Department Cairo, Elephantine, Egypt)

The working process with archaeological data often means dealing with worldwide distributed published and unpublished data. As excavations can last several decades or even centuries, sometimes undertaken with teams from different countries, the documentation and excavated artefacts are not necessarily published and exposed in the same place and taken out of their context. Also recent excavations – like on Elephantine/Egypt which we took as example – have the problem of distributed documentation and knowledge. Excavations were carried out there since decades by different teams of archaeologists and other specialists. The enormous amount of information makes it very difficult to share information easily and to get a brief overview over the data needed for research in an appropriate way and time.
The effort in implementing computer-assisted collaborative working-processes in the daily archaeological work may open a variety of new aspects how to publish and expose distributed data and should renew defocused knowledge. By providing digital data on a web server to be viewed as a shared environment inside Google Earth we propose a visual discussion-platform for archaeological research and reconstruction.
An approach for setting up an easy to use yet well-structured 3D-based document index is a major element of our research. We will introduce a publishing solution to a Google Earth Server System that will allow the collaboration of specialists of different disciplines distributed over various geographic locations. Hereby several sources of archaeological data (literature references, maps, 3d models, images, etc.) can be geo-referenced as well as attributed with temporal data, converted into KML and additional Google Earth compatible file formats (COLLADA, …) which will be transferred to a server system. All the single object entities will be grouped together in linked KML structures automatically, which allows therefore an easy extending and updating of the published data.
Different data from excavations on Elephantine will provide some examples how to generate a visual index and the discussion process about reconstructions in an Google Earth based distributed collaboration environment.

Keywords: Collaborative Work, Visual Index, Distributed Data, Google Earth