Hello I'm Lennart Martens

Dr. Lennart Martens, professor of Systems Biology at UGent, group leader at VIB. Creator of the PRIDE database for public proteomics data dissemination at EMBL-EBI, active member of the Human Proteome Organization Proteomics Standards Initiative.

Hello I'm Bas Baccarne

Researching media, with a focus on citizen empowerment through the co-development of socio-technical innovations in an urban environment.

Hello I'm Maarten Lambrechts

Maarten Lambrechts is a data and multimedia journalist De Tijd - L'Echo and has a background as engineering. That combination enables him to find and tell the stories hidden in data.

Hello I'm Lars Nieuwenhoff

Lars Nieuwenhoff is co-owner of GoOV and founder of INN4CARE, a firm that provides consultancy services on innovation strategy, -methodology and –financing for care- & cure-organisations. INN4CARE supports implementation of the technology in the daily operation & support process, in which the relationship between client, family and care-professional is leading.

Hello I'm Benoît Hucq

General manager of the Agency in charge of promoting the digital economy and industry in Wallonia.

Hello I'm Nils Walravens

Nils Walravens is a business model researcher at iMinds-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research focuses on the tension and opportunities between public and private actors in innovation and more particularly on the role that (local) governments could play in the successful creation and adoption of mobile applications. Nils is now also involved in the launch of the City of Things initiative in the City of Antwerp, a large-scale Smart City Living Lab and IoT-experimentation testbed.

Hello I'm Liesbet De Wolf

Liesbet De Wolf has been working for the Flemish (Geographical) Information Agency since 2003. The mission of the F(G)IA is to enable an optimal application of (geographical) information within the region.

Hello I'm Ari Apteker

Ari studied business engineering and is now part of the digital projects team at the City of Antwerp. He is responsible for project such as Apps for Antwerp and the Antwerp Open Data Portal.

Hello I'm Marc de Vries

Marc de Vries has a focus on legal and economic aspects of open data. In the past 15 years he was intensively involved with access to and re-use of public sector information and Open Data in all its shapes and forms.

Hello I'm Ingrid Willems

Ingrid is an entrepreneur, sparring partner and strategist. She helps organizations to grow their business, by leveraging the power of their business network. Ingrid is convinced that ecosystems and platforms enable greater collaboration, fuel new business models and enable large and small organizations to contribute and gain value in novel ways.

Hello I'm Ann Bernaert

Ann is the domain manager for web at Digipolis Ghent and has years of experience with the challenges of open data in a local government setting. Thanks to her efforts, the City of Ghent was the first tier in Flanders regarding the publishing of Linked Open Data.

Hello I'm Joris Deene

Joris Deene, lawyer at Everest Attorneys completed his Degree in Law magna cum laude at the University of Ghent. In addition, he gained a Postgraduate Certificate in International Copyright at the University of Amsterdam. From 2002 to 2010 Joris Deene was a scientific researcher at the University of Ghent in the field of ICT and Intellectual Property Law. He is a certified third decider for .be domain disputes (CEPINA), member of the Council for Intellectual Property (FOD Economie) and advises the Partnership for Copyright & Society (SA&S).

Hello I'm Han Tambuyzer

Managing Partner of nazka mapps Han is one of the founding partners of nazka mapps. Nazka makes interactive mapping applications and provides new insights, awareness or necessary information in a sustainable society context.

Hello I'm Bart Hanssens

Bart Hanssens is an open standards and Open Data expert working for Fedict, the Belgian Federal Public Service for ICT. He's an all-round IT'er with a focus on "open"

Hello I'm Frank Verschoor

Working with municipal, regional and national government bodies, Frank quickly knows how to strike the right chords to create movement. To him, Open Data is about people, their mindset and their actions.

Hello I'm Lieke Ploeger

ieke is the Community Manager of the OpenGLAM initiative, promoting free and open access to digital cultural heritage data. She currently leads the work on the Open Content Exchange Platform being developed in the eSpace project aimed at increasing and enhancing the creative industries’ use of online collections of digital cultural content. Before joining Open Knowledge, she worked at the National Library of the Netherlands, where she was involved in several large-scale European research projects in the areas of digitisation and digital preservation.

Hello I'm Anastasia Dimou

Anastasia Dimou holds a M.Sc. in e-Government technologies from University of Trento, Italy and a M.Sc. in Web Science from Aristotle University, Greece. As from 2013 she is a researcher in Semantic Web and Linked Open Data technologies at Multimedia Lab of Ghent University - iMinds. Anastasia has been involved in different research projects. Her main interest and expertise is related to knowledge representation, integration and management. She is focused on mapping and interlinking data to semantically annotate and integrate knowledge while and after publishing Linked Data.

Hello I'm Erik Mannens

Prof. dr. ir. Erik Mannens heads the Data Science activities of iMinds & UGent - Data Science Lab, where he tries to fuse AI & Semantics.

Hello I'm Johan Van de Wauw

Johan Van de Wauw. President of OSGeo.be. Senior Data Scientist/GIS Consultant at RealDolmen.

Hello I'm Veronique Volders

Veronique Volders is Program Manager E-Strategy at the Flemish Agency for Domestic Governance.

Hello I'm Greet Brosens

Greet Brosens works at Digipolis, the ICT partner for the Cities of Antwerp and Ghent. She has an intermediary role between the City of Antwerp, Digipolis and the technology market. Greet is an advocate of ACPaaS, the Antwerp City Platform, and of opening up the city in a technological way.

Hello I'm Pieter Colpaert

Works at iMinds. Member of the board of Open Knowledge Belgium and works on iRail. Researches open transport data with Linked Connections

Hello I'm Tom Janssens

Tom Janssens is a Belgian developer focused on creating user-focused things for the web, tech entrepreneur and free software advocate. Tom is COO of Timble and lead developer of the Open Government Platform of the Belgian Police.

Hello I'm Barbara Dierickx

Barbara Dierickx is a staff member of PACKED vzw. She is involved in the opencultuurdata.be project and will discuss how good data is the key for partnering with for example WikiData.

Hello I'm Emilie Hermans

Emilie Hermans is part of the OpenAIRE Belgium team, based at Ghent University. OpenAIRE is the Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe. The infrastructure harvests, enriches, interlinks and shares data and publications from European repositories. A human network in 33 countries across Europe supports users with practical information. Emilie is part of that human network and supports different stakeholders in the use of OpenAIRE.

Hello I'm Guillaume Lobet

I am a FNRS post-doc researcher at the Université de Liège, in Belgium, in the Plant Physiology lab of Pr. Claire Perilleux. I am currently doing a 6 months research internship at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, in the group of Pr. Andrea Schnepf. The aim of my current project is to quantify the growth and developmental regulations (allometry) between the root and the shoot in the model plant maize. The project focuses on the events occurring before and after the floral transition. I develop image analysis and phenotyping tools to help researchers in their scientific workflow.

Hello I'm Bénédicte Gombault

Bénédicte Gombault studied law (incl master in European law); she is project manager within the King Baudouin Foundation for projects on health with a focus on medical research, on elderly and integrated care. She’s involved in the European project called RRI Tools where the KBF is one of the partners and launched the European Foundations Award for Responsible Research and Innovation.

Hello I'm Toon Vanagt

Toon Vanagt is a entrepreneur with broad experience in all aspects of setting up and managing ventures in the Benelux. He has hands-on experience with e-business, consulting, big data and ICT projects.

Hello I'm Raf Buyle

Raf holds a Masters Degree in Applied Engineering in ICT – Electronics and is involved in strategic e-Government projects for local and regional governments since 2002. As an advisor in e-government strategy, Raf tries to implement a more rational, interoptable e-government, promoting open data, open standards and open processes. Raf is also board member of Open Knowledge Belgium. He’s active in the in the Open Data community, advocating Open Tourism Data.

Hello I'm Joep Luijten

Joep Luijten is a senior manager in Capgemini’s Application Services division. He holds a PhD in engineering and is particularly experienced in geographical information systems, enterprise data management and solution architecture. He has worked in the broader Geo-ICT field for nearly 20 years, more recently as project manager of various Geo-ICT and e-government projects in the Flemish public sector.

Hello I'm Anthony Bosschem

Hello I'm Peter Mechant

Peter is a PhD in communication sciences involved in research projects in the context of smart cities, big, open and linked data. His main research interests include smart cities, big and open data, Web 2.0 and computer-mediated communication.

Hello I'm Pieter Heyvaert

Pieter Heyvaert is a Semantic Web Researcher at iMinds - Ghent University, where he works on mapping data to Linked Data, using RML.

Hello I'm Alina Saenko

Alina Saenko is one the staff members at packed, the center of expertise for digital heritage. Within the organisation she is active with the fields of open cultural data, Digital European heritage projects and a project around creating peristent identification for online objects, data and images.

Hello I'm Frederik Feys

Frederik Feys is the Founder of OpenAntwerpen.be, platform for facilitating city dreams. Frederik Feys believes that transparency is a way to restore broken relationships between citizens and government. Open data is an opportunity to accelerate this process.

Hello I'm Thimo Thoeye

Thimo is a software engineer with a strong interest in open and linked data. He lives in Ghent and works at the City of Ghent, Open Knowledge Belgium and the Flemish ICT society for local governments (V-ICT-OR).

Hello I'm Romaine

Romaine is a board member of Wikimedia Belgium and an active contributor to Wikipedia. He organises various activities and projects to open up the Belgian culture and education. Romaine is the lead of the Wiki Loves Art Belgium project.

Hello I'm Peter Desmet

Peter is the LifeWatch team coordinator at the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). He is a driving force behind INBO's Open Data policy, geeks about publishing biodiversity data and loves creating visualizations.

Hello I'm Raf Verbruggen

Raf Verbruggen works at De Ambrassade on spatial planning, mobility and housing policy. De Ambrassade puts youth, youth work, youth information and youth policy on the map. We strengthen the position of children and young people in society.

Hello I'm Bruno Koninckx

Bruno Koninckx works @Thomas More and is Project Manager of ‘Towards a sustainable mobile tourism guide’. Besides that, he conducts research in digital media, mobile technology and innovation.

Hello I'm Marc Portier

Marc Portier works as a civil servant with Westtoer, the organization responsible for the promotion of Tourism (marketing, product and recreation development, support, consulting and knowledge gathering) in the province West Flanders. The area covers all of the Belgian coast, Bruges and surroundings, the "Flanders Fields" region and the valley of the "Lyss" (Leie). Within the organization his role is to normalize, organize, educate and inspire on the proper usage of modern digital (social, local, mobile) tools, techniques and opportunities.

Hello I'm Dennie Declercq

Dennie Declercq is the founder of VZW DDSoft. He's obsessed with making software and apps for people with a disability. He works as volunteer in VZW Ithaka where he writes software for people with a mental disability, and has now his own nonprofit DDSoft

Hello I'm Dimitri Brosens

Dimitri is data liaison officer at the Belgian Biodiversity Platform, at INBO. He loves to chat with researchers to help them publish their data. His ultimate goal is to get Belgium on the world map of biodiversity data.

Hello I'm Bart Van Herbruggen

Bart Van Herbruggen is advisor knowledge strategy at the Department of Mobility and Public Works, which is part of the Flemish government administration. He has a background as a researcher in the field of transport and environmental economics, developing simulation and optimization models. His main interests are in indicators for policy evaluation, data analysis and open data as a means to achieve transport policy objectives.

Hello I'm Jan Vansteenlandt

Jan Vansteenlandt has been active in the Open Data movement since 2011, has a data start-up and keeps track of anything data, including (Linked) Open Data.

Hello I'm Nikos Loutas

Nikolaos Loutas is a senior manager in PwC’s Consulting Technology practice, helping clients do away with long standing data integration and interoperability challenges that will improve their internal processes and the services that they provide. He is working mainly on projects in the broader field of information management, particularly on data governance, management, and analytics for the public sector. Nikolaos holds a PhD in semantic web which focused on modelling and analysing customers’ feedback and expectations to improve services provided by the public and the private sector.