Kilbride (2004) points out that 'technology is not, alone, the answer'. There are much more fundamental problems with the ways that we have collected and organised our data behind the walls of our nation states and the institutions within them. These are problems that have been met by the ARENA project but for which solutions can only come through considerable joint working initiatives:
Most important among these problems are issues of language (both national language differences and internal semantic variations)
Also important are the tools available to express information spatially and temporally
It is important to describe the data (metadata) that we have so that it can be discovered reliably by researchers and managers. This is often neglected
It is also clear from the work of ARENA that we manage our information in different ways; much data is not digital and needs digitising to make it freely available using the Internet
Many working in archaeology and heritage management are still unaware of the need to conserve and archive digital data actively, and we are still largely unaware of the potential that information technologies hold for extending the way that we publish our information across Europe.
Each of these issues is dealt with in the remaining sections of this article.