FYI - UK's national digital twin programme

This email is in relation to the potential relationship between the Web of Things as an abstraction layer for digital twins, and work on smart cities to expose digital twins for the built environment. Wikipedia defines the built environment as including all of the physical parts of where we live and work (e.g. homes, buildings, streets, open spaces, and infrastructure). The built environment influences a person's level of physical activity.

I had a call yesterday with Peter El Hajj, Matthew West and James Hetherington to learn about the UK's national digital twin programme [1]. This is run by the Centre for Digital Built Britain, a partnership between the University of Cambridge and the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Launched by HM Treasury in July 2018, the NDTp was set up to deliver key recommendations of the National Infrastructure Commission’s 2017 'Data for the Public Good Report’ [2]. They also referred me to the Gemini Principles [3] which focuses on information management across the built environment. The DT Hub itself is available at [4]. There are some introductory videos on [1].

The idea is essentially to provide a national framework for secure data sharing where the data isn’t necessarily free, but must be available on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions. Matthew West explained that they had a framework of ontologies to encourage semantic interoperability.

This raises the question of whether W3C’s Web of Things is a good fit to the kinds of digital twins that cities expect to expose.  Matthew committed to sharing information of their use cases and requirements. I offered to help them with any questions on WoT.

p.s. we also discussed ideas on simplifying semantic technologies for the average developer and I pointed them at the W3C chunks data and rules format [5]. This part of a framework for general purpose human-like AI for digital transformation. I will present this to the upcoming Siemens IoT conference.

[1] https://www.cdbb.cam.ac.uk/what-we-do/national-digital-twin-programme <https://www.cdbb.cam.ac.uk/what-we-do/national-digital-twin-programme> 
[2] https://www.nic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Data-for-the-Public-Good-NIC-Report.pdf <https://www.nic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Data-for-the-Public-Good-NIC-Report.pdf> 
[3] https://www.cdbb.cam.ac.uk/DFTG/GeminiPrinciples <https://www.cdbb.cam.ac.uk/DFTG/GeminiPrinciples> 
[4] https://digitaltwinhub.co.uk/ <https://digitaltwinhub.co.uk/> 
[5] https://w3c.github.io/cogai/ <https://w3c.github.io/cogai/> 

Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
W3C Data Activity Lead & W3C champion for the Web of things