Dick M.A. Schaap
Dick M.A. Schaap is a coastal engineer with major expertise in the field of ocean and marine data management. He is founder and managing director of the MARIS company, a spin-off from an earlier interdepartmental initiative in the Netherlands. He has a long experience and is very qualified in organising and managing EU projects for development and operation of networks, databases and technical infrastructures for management and provision of ocean & marine data. As such, MARIS is well involved in many EU projects and initiatives, aimed at improving ocean data interoperability, FAIRness, and coverage of leading marine and ocean data infrastructures, such as EMODnet, ENVRI-FAIR, JERICO, EuroFleets, and EOSC-FUTURE. Moreover, he is co-founder and technical coordinator of the SeaDataNet pan-European network of data centres, and one of the initiators of the Blue-Cloud project (pilot and current 2026 project), acting as project technical coordinator and leading the work package on the federated Blue-Cloud Data Discovery & Access Service.
