{"id":5235,"date":"2026-09-18T12:04:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T10:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/landwater-digishape-community-accelerates-digital-innovation\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T12:13:30","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T10:13:30","slug":"landwater-digishape-community-accelerates-digital-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/landwater-digishape-community-accelerates-digital-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Land+Water: DigiShape community accelerates digital innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article appeared in the journal Land+Water, no. 3, July 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

From fragmented data and models to collective impact on the water sector<\/h2>\n\n

The water sector has a wealth of data, models and digital tools, from satellite images to AI applications. Especially now, those resources are indispensable. The sector is facing major challenges, as climate change increases the pressure, while energy, raw materials and personnel are becoming scarcer. Yet parties still share their knowledge too little. DigiShape connects those worlds and accelerates joint digital innovation. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n

The open innovation platform, started in 2019, now consists of twenty partners<\/a> and a network of hundreds of organisations from the triple helix of knowledge institutions, market parties and government. Together, they are investigating how digital and innovative solutions can contribute to the major water challenges. These include, for example, water movement models based on machine learning, smarter sailing with fewer emissions, reliable information about cables and pipelines at sea, digital twins for dike management and better access to marine observation and monitoring data. Also important are the underlying agreements that enable collaboration, such as FAIR data principles, shared infrastructure and secure collaboration. <\/p>\n\n

Exploring together for scaling up<\/h2>\n\n

Through DigiShape days and webinars, parties come together at an early stage around their questions, ideas and prototypes. Colleagues meet each other, exchange knowledge and gain a better understanding of what is going on in the sector. In this way, they explore which ideas are promising, who is working on similar questions and what is needed to grow them into a collaboration or project proposal. An important instrument in this is DigiShape seed money: a small financial incentive to sharpen and enrich promising ideas with the companies and organizations involved. <\/p>\n\n

The starting point is always: ‘open unless’. This means that results and tools do not stay within one organization, but are basically shared with the affiliated community, so that others can build on them. As a network, DigiShape can also bring more weight than individual parties alone. Partners come together at tables where they would be less likely to sit individually, for example at ministries, public problem holders and the AI community. This togetherness also increases the impact. <\/p>\n\n

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Sharing knowledge, accelerating solutions<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Sjoerd Conijn, information manager shipping at Rijkswaterstaat: “DigiShape brings parties together to take digital innovation further. For Rijkswaterstaat, it is valuable to share what we are working on and at the same time to see what knowledge, solutions and questions other partners have. If problem holders contribute their tasks and market parties and knowledge institutions join in, we can develop solutions together that one organization cannot achieve alone.”<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

Open source results to build on<\/h2>\n\n

A clear example is the DigiShape project D-OSP<\/a>. This TKI project focuses on digital collaboration across organizational boundaries: how can parties securely share and use knowledge, data, models and open source code, without each organization building its own solutions from scratch? In six mutually reinforcing work packages, solutions have been developed for, among other things, reconstructing accidents on water, calculating energy consumption over shipping routes, analysing waiting times in ports and performing shipping calculations at the European level. <\/p>\n\n

An essential work package laid the technical foundation for that collaboration: an open-source cloud infrastructure that can work together with existing cloud platforms. This allows data and models to be used in multiple cloud environments, without putting everything in one place. That way, partners don’t become dependent on a single vendor, such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. This approach has been laid down in a white paper and immediately tested in the other work packages. In this interview with Fedor Baart you can read about the results of D-OSP<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n

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Not the same puzzle every time<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Gert-Jan Schotmeijer, Deltares, project leader D-OSP: “Within DigiShape, we prevent every organization from solving the same technical puzzles. This results in shared code, data and models. The D-OSP project has yielded two follow-up directions with great potential: open source cloud infrastructure and shipping and logistics. We are now writing proposals for that.”<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

Results that have a further impact<\/h2>\n\n

Other results of DigiShape also show how open sharing can have an effect. OpenCLSim<\/a> is an open-source simulation tool that can be used to calculate logistics processes on and around the water, for example in relation to currents, waves and shipping movements. The DigiPACT<\/a> project builds on this with models, software and open-source code for smarter sailing with fewer emissions. The results have been included in PATH2ZERO, a European follow-up project on making shipping more sustainable. <\/p>\n\n

DigiShape has also made an important contribution to the further development and use of the simulation platform MSP Challenge<\/a> as a Digital Twin for the North Sea. This digital twin has been used in a large number of co-design sessions at home and abroad with students, policymakers and stakeholders on themes such as aquaculture, wind energy and sand extraction. <\/p>\n\n

From project to programme<\/h2>\n\n

The next step for DigiShape is to apply this way of working in larger programs. This is done, for example, in the AI Impulse Programme for water movement models<\/a>, which focuses on an urgent practical question of Rijkswaterstaat: how can water movement models become faster, more flexible and more scalable? The programme is supported by Rijkswaterstaat, KNMI and Deltares, among others. DigiShape connects this program with other governments, companies, knowledge institutions, startups and scaleups that want to think along or join. <\/p>\n\n

The programmatic role is also becoming visible around the TKI Delta Technology. DigiShape has a leading role in the Digitalisation programme line and prepares joint TKI proposals with partners. This can be done faster because the network is already there. Partners know each other, know what questions there are and have previously explored where opportunities lie. Through writing sessions, practical questions, data, ideas and possible consortia are brought together. In this way, DigiShape is growing from individual projects to larger collaborations under public innovation funds. <\/p>\n\n

This also makes it clear where the next bottleneck lies in preconditions such as data sharing, standards, ownership, management, financing, governance, validation and embedding in work processes. DigiShape can accelerate ideas, connect parties and advance new technology as a catalyst, but the step to scaling up requires more governments, managers and other commissioning parties to contribute their tasks to DigiShape. That means: formulating questions clearly, making data available and being willing to help finance follow-up projects. So that digital innovation does not get stuck in pilots and prototypes, but grows into solutions that the water sector needs now. <\/p>\n\n

Working together on digital clout<\/h2>\n\n

Digital development in the water sector requires collaboration between people, data and practical questions. DigiShape brings parties together to share and further develop knowledge, models and applications. Organizations that want to contribute ideas or submit a question can find more information on digishape.nl. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article appeared in the journal Land+Water, no. 3, July 2026. From fragmented data and models to collective impact on the water sector The water sector has a wealth of data, models and digital tools, from satellite images to AI applications. Especially now, those resources are indispensable. The sector is facing major challenges, as climate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5231,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[128,205,138,101,1,206,203,100],"tags":[139,261],"project-status":[],"ppma_author":[26],"class_list":["post-5235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-analysis-modeling-and-ai","category-data-collection","category-data-storage-en-exchange","category-data-visualization","category-news","category-spatial-planning-north-sea","category-water-and-logistics-en","category-water-management","tag-about-digishape","tag-uitgelicht"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":26,"user_id":2,"is_guest":0,"slug":"rianne-croes","display_name":"Rianne Croes","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rianne-Croes-600.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rianne-Croes-600.jpg"},"author_category":"1","first_name":"","last_name":"","user_phone":"0619202578","user_url":"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/riannecroes\/","job_title":"Communicatieadviseur DigiShape","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5236,"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235\/revisions\/5236"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5235"},{"taxonomy":"project-status","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project-status?post=5235"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digishape.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=5235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}