Finally, a discussion of the merits and limitations of GE is presented along with conclusions and remaining challenges. These examples form the basis for highlighting current trends in remote sensing archaeology based on the GE platform, which could provide access to a low-cost and easy-to-use tool for communicating and sharing ACH geospatial data more effectively to the general public in the era of Digital Earth. The selected case studies illustrate how GE can be used effectively to investigate ACH at multiple scales, discover new archaeological sites in remote regions, monitor historical sites, and assess damage in areas of conflict, and promote virtual tourism. In this review, in order to discuss the huge potential of GE, a comprehensive review of GE and its applications to ACH in the published scientific literature is first presented case studies in five main research fields demonstrating how GE can be deployed as a key tool for studying ACH are then described. Based on geographical tools and multi-temporal very high-resolution (VHR) satellite imagery, GE has been shown to provide spatio-temporal change information that has a bearing on the physical, environmental, and geographical character of ACH. GE can often be used to survey and document ACH so that both skilled archaeologists and the public can more easily and intuitively understand the results. Most of these concern specific ACH investigations with a wide spatial coverage. In the past decade, many peer-reviewed articles on the use of GE in the archaeological cultural heritage (ACH) research field have been published. Different from traditional geographical information systems (GIS), GE is free and easy to use in data collection, exploration, and visualization. It enables archaeologists around the world to communicate and share their multisource data and research findings. Google Earth (GE), a large Earth-observation data-based geographical information computer application, is an intuitive three-dimensional virtual globe. Most of our future planning activities will use it as a way not only to have smooth access to the past but also to plan collectively shared scenarios for the future. On this 4D skeleton, information of cadastral maps, BIM data, or any other specific layers of a geographical information system can be easily articulated.
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The 4D world emerges as a series of sparse spatiotemporal zones that are progressively connected, forming a denser fabric of representations. Through the automatic recognition of “homologous points,” the photographic material gets connected in time and space, enabling the geometrical computation of hypothetical reconstructions accounting for a perpetually evolving reality. The technology that currently permits the advent of the 4D World through new articulations of dense photographic material combining aerial imagery, historic photo archives, huge video libraries, and crowd-sourced photo documentation precisely exploits this latent potential.
The underlying assumption of the early large-scale photographic campaign was that image archives had deeper depths of latent knowledge still to be mined.
It retraces how large-scale photographic surveys served to build the first 3D models of buildings, cities, and territories, how these models got shaped into physical and virtual globes, and how eventually the temporal dimension was introduced as an additional way for navigating not only through space but also through time.
This commentary gives an overview of the history of the converging trends that have progressively shaped this concept. The 4D Mirror World is considered to be the next planetary-scale information platform.