Dick Schaap

MARIS and Technical Coordinator of Blue-Cloud 

He started his career as coastal engineer in Rijkswaterstaat, North Sea Directorate, designing maritime infrastructure and leading a department managing and using data from the real time North Sea observation network of the Netherlands. In that position he started the MARIS project for gaining better overview and access to marine data sets from national organizations in the Netherlands. Already in an early stage, he became increasingly involved in initiating and building European capacity in marine data management. MARIS was privatized and as director he continued in many European projects, aiming for developing and operating what became the SeaDataNet pan-European infrastructure for marine data management. He can be considered as a European expert in The domain of ocean and marine data and information management, and in applying supporting informatics, but also in finding ways for organizing feasible solutions and managing cooperations on a transnational scale. At present he is coordinator of EMODnet Data Ingestion and technical coordinator of SeaDataNet, EMODnet Chemistry, EMODnet Bathymetry, and Blue-Cloud 2026 to name a few leading EU projects.