We are STM – Oliver Norkus, Research Associate, University of Oldenburg

Interview

So who are you Oliver?

I am a senior IT-architect and researcher from the University of Oldenburg, with experience from R&D at both institutions and the industry. In STM I am leading the architecture team and actually I am also the infrastructure sub-project leader due to a maternity leave.

What do you do in STM?

I work with central components of the infrastructure to make sure that the ones who will add the value to the users of STM, don’t have to worry about technical details like authentication, encryption and decryption. I work with colleagues to define meaningful guidelines and common approaches to achieve semantic interoperability and to conceptualize and realize a technical compliance audit framework. Thus, we help others to become heroes defining services that are simple to use, while the work of the architecture team guarantees the interoperability and security and other quality of service attributes.

Any key success factors in your work?

The fact that some partners took part in both EfficienSea II project, where the Maritime Connectivity Platform (MCP), with id management and service management was built, and in STM Validation project, where the interoperability was created in the System Wide Information Management, SeaSWIM, was important for the architectural development. STM was setting many requirements on MCP and it was very practical for me to discuss with my colleagues working on the other project, partly by just walking to the next desk. STM and MCP is like a happy constructive marriage!

What has been the most fun?

To actually work with people from many different organisations and background. Every meeting we ask new questions and thus the solutions we have built are far better than solutions from one single organization, because the concepts and ideas are overarching and can contribute to digitize the entire maritime domain. One plus one really makes three in STM.