Website for Digital Twin Web Association
22 February 2024 by Juuso Autiosalo
Dear Digital Twin Web enthusiast,
two years has passed since the inauguration meeting of Digital Twin Web Association on February 22nd 2022. It was probably too early to launch operations of an association then, and probably still is. Interest was and is strong, but there were too few concrete and interesting things to do as a primarily voluntary based organization. Some business needs to come first, and that is what I have been working on.
A year ago we were starting the Research to Business project “Twinbase” to prepare the commercialization of the open source version of Twinbase. That first version of Twinbase set the overall structure of Digital Twin Web, but while it has been great for research purposes, it was not ready for proper operational use. The concrete need or “killer case” outside research labs was also not clear.
Now we have built the next “business-friendly” version of Twinbase and are focusing on moving product data between software systems and organizations. We have developed a pilot application with a construction engineering company Granlund to help their engineers import product data into their plans. The data comes from LVI-INFO , which is a Finland-based service where HVAC equipment manufacturers upload data about their products. We are currently expanding the pilot to cover more data transfer needs across the whole HVAC ecosystem.
The digital twin description document methodology that is at the core of Digital Twin Web and Twinbase suits very well for implementing Digital Product Passports. Upcoming EU regulation will require certain products to have product passports that contain sustainability information about the product. The details are still unclear, but quite surely a QR code attached to the physical product will lead to the passport.
Semantics is now used as the core of how information is stored and processed in Twinbase. Semantics help us connect data models of different software systems and industry-specific standards, and semantics will enable a significant overall efficiency boost in cross-organizational data transfer if used correctly.
That is why we sincerely hope that the Digital Product Passports required by the EU will be semantics-based. The EU is already using semantics, so there is hope.
With all that business progress, what is the role of the association? The same things that I mentioned in the previous update still apply.
The dtid.org service should be maintained by a reliable entity, although we now have an API-friendly dtid.dev service that we use for development purposes.
The twinschema.org vocabulary is being worked on, but should ultimately be handled by some other entity than single company.
And yeah, I did not push to register the association. But the time will come.
Let me know if any thoughts or questions arise!
My Aalto email may stop working on the latter half of this year as we launch the startup company for Twinbase, but I will always update my contact info to juu.so
Best,
Juuso