My professional career focuses on knowledge extraction from (big) data by using geospatial analytics capabilities, multi-disciplinary interoperability, and open innovation. The underlying interests are threefold; they include (i) research on Digital Earth and Citizen Science, (ii) policy, especially SEIS; Digital Agenda for Europe and Innovation Union; and (iii) technology, including Observation Web and Linked Data.
Since September 2013, I am working as a scientific officer for JRC's Digital Earth and Reference Data Unit, where I was already employed for three years as a post-doc (2009-2012) and six months as an intern (2005). Before re-joining the JRC, I worked at the European Environment Agency (EEA) as project manager for the Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS). In my early career, I spent ten years with the Institute for Geoinformatics (IfGI) of the University of Muenster - where I completed my diploma and PhD studies (in 2004 and 2009, respectively) and contributed to numerous national and European-level research projects in the area of geospatial information science. At IfGI, I was employed as a member of the Münster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL) and between 2006 and 2009 I also worked as technical consultant for Geospatial Partners s.r.l. I am the Editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Spatial Data Infrastructures Research (IJSDIR), council member and co-chair the Youth Commission of the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE), and have authored and co-authored more than 80 publications in the fields of geospatial semantics, observation web and next-generation knowledge infrastructures.