Willy Van Puymbroeck obtained a PhD in Physics from the University of Antwerp in 1981. Before joining the European Commission in 1988 he worked as a Software Engineer in the telecommunication industry. His main activity then concerned on programming languages and proof systems.

At the European Commission he held different position mainly working in DG CONNECT in various domains such as Integrated Manufacturing, Semiconductors and eGovernment. In 2018 he moved to DG DIGIT to take the responsibility for ‘IT Solutions for Legislation, Policy and HR’. Since 2020 he is an active senior in the Commission working on the LEOS – Legislation Editing Open Software – project.

Alberto Abella is Ph.D. in Business (Open data) and Telecommunications Engineer and Master in Total Quality Management, Business Administration, and Business Organization. He works as a Data Modelling Expert and Technical Evangelist at FIWARE and currently is the responsible person for the smart data models initiative.

This is an agile standardization initiative to map existing semantics and new needs in an open licensed repository.  Formerly he worked as Senior Manager at desideDatum for the business lines of Data governance, open data, and smart cities and in other IT firms for the last 25 years.  He is a researcher on data, data-reusability, agile standardization, open data, big data, and its use in several environments like Smart cities with more than 20 scientific publications.

He belongs to the 100 of COTEC network as expert on Open Data and is founder and former board member of Iniciativa Barcelona Open data and founder of the Spanish chapter of OKFN. He coordinated the I, II, and III white paper on software libre in Spain from 2003 to 2007.

He is a co-author of the I, II, III adn IV reports on the situation of open data in Spain (2017-2023). Recently he has been granted by StandICT to create this report "Data sovereignty AI classification for data spaces" https://algorithmclassification.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/REPORT_ALBERTO_ABELLA_DATA_SOVEREIGNITY_v1.05.pdf

Carlos Alonso Peña has had an extensive IT professional and managerial career in Public Administrations, currently performing his duties as director of the Data Office Division, contributing to the digital transformation process that we are experiencing, helping to promote exchange, management and use of data in all productive sectors of the economy and society.