The aim of this paper is a critical survey on the webGIS in Archaeology and their real usability. At the First time a GIS on the web was called WebGIS, now are used also different terms as Webmapping and webcartography, but often is not well discriminated if there is a different meaning or not. Furthermore the WebGIS is a technology that allow to be presented spatial information in a user friendly format on the Web. Summarizing this kind of system allow for: data archiving, data creation, data editing, data analysis, query building, data visualization. The power of the platform is the possibility to have a different access by different users, generally the users are able to do: consultation of database and geographic maps; making queries and refine search in the database; creation of thematic maps with different layers; thematic selection and printing; draw spatial entity; administrator users can modify and update the database.

In the last years thanks to the Open source applications there was a growing up of WebGIS projects, also small works were put on the web in order to disseminate the data and to improve the collaboration between the people. In the Osgeo website it is possible to download some applications and find all information (http://www.osgeo.org/) about the free system for instance MapServer, Geomaja, Geoserver. But WebGIS is not only OS and there are different programs, the most used are : ESRI ArcIMS, Intergraph GeoMedia WebMap, Autodesk Mapguide (Enterprise, but also OS). Different matter concerns the API of GE applied in some works.

There are a lot of archaeological WebGIS projects, but the issue is that are these project useful for who? Which is the main aim? Spread data or a way to disseminate the know-how to the archaeological community? Which kind of data are shared? Are their used only for strict audience or for widely range of users? How long the web pages are loaded dynamic and quickly? Moreover most of these projects after a few years are not developed more, the websites did not work anymore, also often the interface is not really user friendly and the server is too slow, at the end are not "attractive" for the internet community.

The purpose of that survey is try to understand through the exam of the past projects which is the future of the WebGIS in archaeology and the next developments in terms of Open Knowledge and cultural dissemination.