Collaboration of Digital Twins through Linked Open Data: Architecture with FIWARE as Enabling Technology

TL;DR

The paper addresses the interoperability barrier in Digital Twins caused by a lack of standardization. It proposes extending a FIWARE-based DT architecture to incorporate Linked Open Data (LOD) so DTs can publish and consume data via Open Data Portals, with Draco handling data homogenization and CKAN/DCAT metadata for discovery. A parking/urban DT use case demonstrates real-time LOD publication and consumption, showcasing IoT integration, NGSI-LD, and Smart Data Models within the FIWARE stack. The findings support LOD as a practical mechanism to enable DT collaboration, while outlining future work on metadata quality, scenario validation, and private data handling.

Abstract

The collaboration of the real world and the virtual world, known as Digital Twin, has become a trend with numerous successful use cases. However, there are challenges mentioned in the literature that must be addressed. One of the most important issues is the difficulty of collaboration of Digital Twins due to the lack of standardization in their implementation. This article continues a previous work that proposed a generic architecture based on the FIWARE components to build Digital Twins in any field. Our work proposes the use of Linked Open Data as a mechanism to facilitate the communication of Digital Twins. We validate our proposal with a use case of an urban Digital Twin that collaborates with a parking Digital Twin. We conclude that Linked Open Data in combination with the FIWARE ecosystem is a real reference option to deploy Digital Twins and to enable the collaboration between Digital Twins.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Architecture of the parking DT and the urban DT collaboration through LOD. The original parking DT (in gray) is the use case presented in modeling_digital_twin.