All archaeological research depends on data, and this data have to take digital form in order to be used in different computerised analytical operations. Today, computer based Databases are expansively used in archaeology. However, the acceptance of computer techniques solves one part of data management problems, and opens plenty of new ones. Even though digital data becomes the part of everyday archaeological practice, we still can see habits acquired in the early application, and undergo the consequences. This “computer aided” documentation produce badly structured, worst formalized and completely isolated datasets, which in most cases do not serve for anything but replying digitally the old drawers filled with hard-copy archaeological documentation files. When we need to use such data in any con-joint explanatory process, these shortcomings get acutely problematic.
In LAQU wee define the Data Management as a wide research field, and under this fieldname we tackle various specific lines which should be integrated in one inclusive system. Information is not knowledge, but knowledge is impossible without information. The computer framework in which information and knowledge can interact is a generative framework in which the data management and knowledge creation are nested in the same task. We call this framework Telearchaeology (Barceló, Bogdanovic, Piqué 2004): a computer set of concepts, solutions and tools for integration and manipulation of heterogeneous data distributed on the WWW, aimed to generate archaeological knowledge. Through different research projects we focus on development of fieldwork data register, database modelling, data formalisation, data warehousing, data integration, ontology and semantic relations, data mining for significant relations discovery, and data representation.