Gerard Coen obtained a BA French & English from the National University of Ireland, Galway (2010), and an MSc in Communication Science from Ulster University (2012). He worked as a Project Manager in Global Brand & Product Development at Unilever, London, and also L’Oréal, Paris. Driven by curiosity around the impact of emerging technologies on society, in 2017 he began the MSc Innovation Sciences (STS) program at Utrecht University. Shortly afterwards he joined Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), where he works in the Policy Development & Communication department. Gerard works on a Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) Observatory, to explore the histories and evolution of these systems. He is an Editor of the Basel Register of Thesauri, Ontologies & Classifications (BARTOC), and Treasurer of the International Society for Knowledge Organisation (ISKO) Low Countries Chapter. He also works on projects for the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). He is the project co-lead for the FAIRsFAIR project and in addition to project managment and coordination he focuses on making digital objects & data services interoperable, and applying the FAIR concept beyond data.