Rina Clemens' story

Rina Clemens (44, Rhenen) is a group leader for data analysis and information services. Her group checks the quality of data and then uses it in analyses, models and software tools. ‘Data expertise is an important component of many projects.’

From soil investigation to data

‘I’ve been working at Witteveen+Bos for over twenty years now. I graduated in environmental technology and was initially involved in soil investigation and remediation; it’s now around ten years that I've been working with data. It’s in my nature to follow my interests and continue learning. We’ve developed different algorithms to determine whether data is usable. We apply them depending on what’s needed for the dataset. This ensures that colleagues and clients have reliable and high-quality data to work with. Because if your data is rubbish, the outcome of the analysis will often be too.’

Data and context: well-reasoned advice

‘Data is everywhere, and every specialist uses it. More and more data is becoming available, too. Good, reliable measurement data forms the basis of many projects. To produce well-reasoned advice, we work closely with specialists who also contribute expertise and experience regarding the context. Context is vital for giving good advice. The interaction with specialists in the relevant field is something I find very interesting. No question is the same, and conditions and circumstances change continuously.’

Data management platform

‘At the start of my career, I wrote a lot of reports. Nowadays, I work more and more with data management platforms designed to share and reuse information. Or a software tool that allows users to generate new information from data. Witteveen+Bos is currently providing data management for Rijkswaterstaat’s ecological offshore wind programme. We’ve designed a platform to store data on birds, bats and marine mammals, among others, and make it available for various users. We ensure that the data is findable, accessible, exchangeable and reusable. I imagine a future in which more and more high-quality data has become available as open data, so that interesting analyses and information products can be made using it.’

 

 

'Data is useless without context'

 

- Rina Clemens -