Olivier Thereaux
Forum Replies Created
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Just now, Nicholas said:
You make a really interesting comparison with the world wide web. What can we learn from the work being done by the World Wide Web Consortium on the Web of Things related to data and interoperability for IoT please?
We were heavily inspired by the work of the W3C (as Simon mentions in the intro to the talk, the ODI and the W3C share a founder, among many connections). We used some of those standards in our prototyping too – so in one way, you can see the web of things as a big part of the technical/protocol infrastructure for the web of twins.
One significant distinction however: I generally see the “web of things” as an approach where devices / assets can be connected directly. The big insight in our research about “web of twins” is that direct connections to the assets will often not be possible, or desirable for many reasons (security being one). That is why it is important to think about connections at differerent levels – collaboration on registers and identifiers, or pooling and sharing of insights.
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12 minutes ago, Guest Luke O’Rafferty said:
I do think your point on pooling/aggregating information, and how we federate to be the most important. If you have a common language for inputs/outputs, an easy (conceptually at least) use case could be how has Covid-19 impact infrastructure energy usage? I can imagine querying each major infrastructure provider to understand where, when and how much energy is being drawn. I imagine the transport networks draw down will have dropped (significantly?) but there would be an uptick in draw from local substations. How does this balance? What does this tell us about the resilience of the network to major shifts?
Yes! Energy/Transport (and Energy/Housing) have been high on our list of sector crossovers and “linking” use cases for digital twins. I agree with you that the current situation provides a powerful incentive to seriously explore them.
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1 minute ago, Chris Jones (NWG) said:
Great. Have you any thoughts on how that might work?
(that = sharing at higher levels)
To be fair, we didn’t explore that in as much depth as I would like. This still feels “early days” with too few well-developed use cases to truly speak authoritatively.
I can certainly picture sharing of insights and predictive models across an industry based on operation of digital twins. I think in some of our research material, we mention the use case of wind turbine repair, and the fact that operators in similar situations may want to share insights about the right way to run maintenance based on the operation of their DTs, but that may not require any data sharing at the raw level.
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5 minutes ago, Chris Jones (NWG) said:
What does strike me about that, and the conversation in the thread, is that we’ve very quickly got hung up on data, which is essentially the lowest level of the twin concept (ref the triangle diagram in the Gemini Principles). Far greater challenged will emerge as we seek to connect twins as this will require co-modelling across vastly different systems, with huge differences in temporal and spatial scales, it will require much more complex decision support and solution space optimisation and for twins to be designed and operated in a manner that makes the benefits they bring to be made available to non-expert users.
Agreed! The presentation tries to cover that in some respect.
When we started exploring this “web of twins” I also expected to mostly be thinking about (raw) data flows, but we quickly realised that there is just as much value, if not more, in getting collaboration (and sharing) at the higher levels (models, insights, decisions).
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Just now, Nicholas said:
What is the relationship between a network of twins and a National Digital Twin for the built environment please?
The two concepts are very similar! The NDT programme is in effect helping build the web of twins, with a focus on creating positive impact at the national infrastructure level.
The notion of a “web of twins” attempts to go beyond national boundaries however: we found it useful in our research to test how far the concept could be scaled up, and given that we will likely have use cases for collaboration and data flows across borders, the “web of twins” we envisaged in our research is worldwide.
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4 minutes ago, Guest Yu(Steven) ZHANG said:
The intermediaries reminds me of Data Trust. “A data trust is an intermediary between data providers, data users and other stakeholders in the sharing and use of data. ” ref: https://theodi.org/article/data-trusts-decision-making-report/
Indeed.
Data Trusts are one of the many approaches for data stewardship though – not all use cases will require fiduciary responsibility. We have been trying to map the variety of approaches here: https://theodi.org/project/the-data-access-map/
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4 minutes ago, Chris Jones (NWG) said:
The need for standards and protocols starts is driven initially by a need to connect sub-systems, rather than to enable an extensive web of systems.
This is incredibly important, and I agree that the first connections will need to be between similar twins and relevant sub-systems. The whole approach (and I hope what the talk conveys) is that over time, these connections will grow and scale up to be a whole web.
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2 minutes ago, Guest Dr Max Mallia-Parfitt said:
I agree in part, but when it comes to data excahnge there has to be a confirmed standard that is extensible, otherwise the benifit of the data exchange will be minimal and people will continue to use ‘Air Gapped’ systems due to their concirn over what data is being shared.
One of the things which our research hints at, is that we may not be seeing (only) direct data connectivity between twins, but in many cases there will be pooling/aggregation of higher level data by intermediaries.
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6 minutes ago, Guest Charles Keen of Baikal AR said:
Hello Olivier, can you tell us how we can get [free] access to the data standards and indexes, please?
There are a number of standards being developed – I don’t think there is a single list anywhere yet (that sounds like something useful to develop). As for free access, we all know that it varies from forum to forum and from initiative to initiative: the W3C “web of things” standards are fully open, and the work done in the DFTG commons will be, I presume, publicly accessible.
Generally speaking, it will be quite important that standards for digital twins are developed as openly as possible to create greatest impact. The ODI has been creating a guidebook on that topic, which I encourage all to use: https://standards.theodi.org/
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26 minutes ago, Guest Dr Max Mallia-Parfitt said:
Digital Twin standards…
In order for digital twins to reliably work across sectors and be interoperable we need to ensure that communications and data standards are adhered to!
[…]
How will this be managed for Digital Twins?
Completely agree – we are going to need standards. The good news is that there are actually a lot of existing standards we can build on and rely on, and some initiatives (like the DFTG) are doing important groundwork for more.
It’s important that we resist the urge to see Digital Twins as a single stack that needs to be standardised centrally. The power of digital twins is that it is an approach / methodology, not a single tech stack. That has an impact on how we create standards for it.
My hunch is that at this point, the most useful thing to do would be for practitioners to share which existing standards they are building on to create and connect twins – whether IoT standards for connectivity, W3C standards for discovery, BIM, etc.
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Hello everyone — looking forward to this conversation!
I hope the video is a good intro to the work the team at the ODI has been conducting, and more broadly to the work being done by the National Digital Twins programme and others.
As a quick introduction: I am the head of R&D at the Open Data Institute, with a professional background in various facets of open tech. I worked for many years in open standards (including several roles at and with the W3C), which is something that may transpire in some of the focus of the video. My team’s focus at the ODI is quite broad, but we mainly aim to create a more open and trustworthy data ecosystem, so a lot of our effort is put towards data infrastructure but also trust and ethics.
We’ve just updated our project page on Digital Twins with a slightly extended deck from the one you see in the video. There is also an annotated version with ample notes and links: https://theodi.org/project/rd-digital-twins/