Digital Twin of the Earth – Tools and Resources for Interoperable Development and Operations

There are many parallel efforts currently underway to build Digital Twins of the Earth (DTEs) and Earth’s subsystems (e.g., Ocean, Atmosphere, Biodiversity). These DTE projects are broad in the field of application, depth of analysis and the ‘level’ of the Earth’s subsystems – and many are all built “from scratch”.

While they are using standards from a wide range of disciplines (most notably computer science and geospatial computing), there are no dedicated standards for digital twins of the earth. This lack of specific coordination activities, agreed practices and published standards makes it difficult to compare digital twins, both in how they have been built, but also their outputs and results for further reuse.

Introducing standards and practices for DTEs not only for the technical/data interoperability, but also for the architecture, semantics, and metadata exchanges, engineering processes, legal and ethical aspects, visualization and user interface/experience, or quality assurance and impact assessment can help new projects to go faster from idea to implementation, potentially adding missing pieces to a true virtual representation of the whole earth.

Due to their nature, DTEs also must include aspects of verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification (VVUQ), which should be part of dedicated DTE standards, as they are key to the responsible development, implementation, monitoring, and sustainability of DTEs.

The goal of this proposed group is to bring together organizations and companies working on DTEs who are interested in collaborating and making their digital twins more interoperable. It aims to sketch out possible standards activities, and thoroughly understand the landscape of Digital Twins of the Earth activities worldwide, as well as within other standards organizations.

The main beneficiaries will be those companies, organizations, and engineers who are developing or working with Digital Twins of the Earth, Developers, and Funders of DTEs.

To learn more about the activity and how to join, please express your interest by filling out the Digital Twin of the Earth interest form or reaching out to the IC Activity Chair listed in the “Contacts” section.