The Digital Twin Consortium, a unit of the Object Management Group, has just published a whitepaper, ‘Infrastructure Digital Twin Maturity: A Model for Measuring Progress’. The 17 page whitepaper labors its way through a distillation of marketing terminology and paints a picture of a digital world that probably does not really exist. The DT is defined as ‘a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes, synchronized at a specified frequency and fidelity’ which is fair enough as a stretch goal, but to claim that ‘for a typical infrastructure project, ... we would normally have several virtual representations ... seamlessly connected into a single Digital Thread’ is a little adventurous. DT maturity is evaluated along a spectrum from ‘dinosaur’ through ‘average’, to ‘leader, ‘evangelist’ and eventually to ‘pioneer’. The authors (from Microsoft, Gafcon and AsBuilt) state that the ‘evolution of the digital thread starts with company and industry standards’. But, although there are 23 mentions of ‘standards’, none are actually cited. No more are any real world chapter-and-verse examples of a digital twin in action.
The soon-to-be shuttered Energistics
upstream standards body has released Version 1.2 of the Energistics
Transfer Protocol. ETP provides an ‘efficient full-duplex connection
between two digital data systems’. Initially targeting the real-time
transfer of data from drilling systems to central monitoring
facilities, the standard is also used to exchange data between
different platforms or applications. The binary format is said to use a
tenth of the communication bandwidth used by legacy solutions.
Energistics reports that ETP will be integrated into the OSDU data
platform. More from Energistics.
The EU has published a 137 page document titled, ‘AI Watch: AI Standardization Landscape state of play and a proposal for an AI regulatory framework’. The report elaborates on the role of standards, but the section on ‘AI standards’ appears is empty. The study provides input to the upcoming EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). After working their way through the smorgasbord of international and EU standards that could impact their work, the authors conclude that ‘many relevant standards exist (already published or in the pipeline). Therefore, the AIA requirement operationalization can build on existing efforts’. Why are we thinking Don Quixote?
In case you all take this to be EU bashing, we note that the IEEE AI Standards Committee is likewise tilting at the AI windmill with a new Project Approval Request for ‘Standard for AI/ML Terminology and Data Formats’.
The IOGP has updated GIGS,
its geospatial integrity of geoscience software test tool. GIGS 2.0 is
an open-source framework for evaluating spatial data integrity in
geospatial software. The framework comprises qualitative evaluations of
software functionality and data-driven tests to quantify the accuracy
and robustness of geodetic engines and libraries. The 2.0 update makes
GIGS simpler to use, more flexible in its application and automates
testing. More here.
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has changed its name to Industry IoT Consortium (still IIC!). The change is accompanied with a new logo and tagline, ‘technology innovation, business transformation’. The IIC’s mission is now to ‘bring transformative business value to organizations, industry, and society by accelerating the adoption of trustworthy IoT systems’.
Membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium
has approved the OGC API for Environmental Data Retrieval specification
as an official OGC Standard. The EDR API ‘makes it easy for users to
access subsets of spatial big data through a web interface that hides
the complexities of data storage’. Enviro data can now be unambiguously
specified by spatio-temporal coordinates, allowing retrieval of small
subsets of environmental data from large collections such as weather
forecasts or climate models. The API can also be used to retrieving
data from computer tomography scans or digital microscopy records. More
from the release.
The OGC has also announced that the OGC API - Features 1.0 executable test suite on the Beta OGC Validator now includes tests from OGC API - Features - Part 2: Coordinate Reference Systems by Reference. More here and more on OGC compliance certification here.
On the topic of coordinate reference systems, OSGEO, the Open Source Geospatial Foundation has released PROJ 8.1.1 with bug fixes and an update to the EPSG CRS database (Version 10.028).
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