We work at the intersection of culture, technology, and trust.
Our projects help institutions, researchers, and policymakers to restructure digital data infrastructures — not to collect more data, but to restore meaning to what already exists.
A data architecture studio is the place where technology and meaning meet. Where data flows are designed with attention to context, provenance, and trust. And where transparency is not a marketing term, but a form of craftsmanship.
At P-322 Consultancy, we build digital infrastructures that not only function, but also understand why they exist — and for whom.
The name Plimpton-322 comes from a Babylonian clay tablet over 3,700 years old: one of the oldest known datasets in tabular form. The scribes of that tablet did not hide their knowledge — they made it visible, careful, and durable. That attitude forms our core.
We believe that the future of digital systems lies not in complexity, but in clarity. That data architecture is not only a technical matter, but also a cultural one. And that insight is the only true foundation of trust.
Plimpton-322 was founded by Gertjan Filarski and Jauco Noordzij, two pioneers in European research and heritage infrastructures. Together they bring more than thirty years of experience in the world of open data, semantic technology, and digital preservation.
What unites them is a rare combination of precision and imagination: they think like engineers but feel like heritage people. Their collaboration rests on one conviction — that trust does not arise from control, but from clarity.
Gertjan is a software developer, historian, and economist. He helped build the digital infrastructure of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences – Humanities Cluster (KNAW-HUC) and served as technical director of CLARIAH — the Netherlands’ largest research infrastructure for the humanities. His expertise lies in designing semantic data flows and knowledge graphs that bridge museums, archives, and research.
Jauco is a computer scientist and software architect with a background in data integration and heritage informatics. He has worked on multiple Dutch and European projects, including CLARIAH, and focuses on translating conceptual models into reliable, lightweight, and reusable software components.
Open data sounds simple, but in practice it rarely is. Anyone who shares heritage data inevitably runs into legal limits, technical constraints, ethical considerations, and geopolitical reality. Ahead of publishing my fourth dataspace experiment next week, this blog pauses on a more fundamental question: what does it really mean to set access conditions within an infrastructure that calls itself “open data”? When is “open” no longer unconditional? And how do you translate policy, trust, and responsibility into technology? This post explores where openness starts to chafe, where control becomes unavoidable, and why that is exactly where dataspaces show their value.
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Data spaces sound abstract until you take them apart and look at what actually happens when multiple parties try to access data at the same time. In this blog I walk through experiments 2 and 3, where a single provider is approached by multiple consumers — including a malicious one. What happens to contracts, keys, and access when the architecture is put under pressure? And where does responsibility really lie: with the provider, or with the party holding the key?
Using working code, I show why roles, transactions, and infrastructure layers matter, and what a data space does — and explicitly does not — promise when it comes to security. No policy talk, but concrete technical observations from experiments that are allowed to break.
data spaces are showing up more and more in heritage policy, but what do they actually mean technically? In this first experiment I build a working data space transaction using European open-source technology: no diagrams, but real software you can run locally. Step by step I show how providers and consumers negotiate, wait, and ultimately exchange data under explicit conditions. No abstract policy talk, but a concrete sign of life beneath the words ‘data space’.
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