The Viking Period proto-town site of Birka on the island of Björkö in Lake Mälaren is one of the prime sites in Swedish archaeology and much research has been done on it. However, with time the amount of available information, the fact that the Birka research has no common research strategy and a bewildering output of publications have all made it difficult to define the current state and future perspectives in research. With the development of a proto-town GIS for Birka on the template of similar projects elsewhere, the state of research can now be consolidated, offering a point of departure for urgently needed syntheses.