Rob Lokers is a project manager of research ICT projects and research infrastructures in the team Earth Observation & Environmental Informatics at Alterra, Wageningen UR. He has a long year experience in managing information system development in scientifically as well as in commercially oriented environments. His expertise area is in leading ICT projects in the scientific domain (agriculture, food security, environment) and focuses on knowledge technology, research infrastructures, Spatial Data Infrastructures and agricultural and environmental modelling systems. He has lead and is leading among others ICT projects and work packages in large international research projects and service contracts. Some examples are research infrastructure initiatives like the FP7 SemaGrow and Trees4Future projects and knowledge platforms like Climate-ADAPT, the European Platform for Climate Adaptation.
Research in the areas of agriculture, food security and environment needs to deal with the ever growing amount of global data and knowledge from diverse sources like earth observation, sensor networks, social networks and citizen observatories. Rob’s focus is on co-creating innovative knowledge infrastructures and applications that advance the level of agro-environmental research by exploiting the possibilities of Big Data using principles from Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web.
Rob is a board member of the Dutch Association for Information Specialists in Agriculture and Food (VIAS) and a national representative for the European Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture, Food and the Environment (EFITA).