The national geospatial policy over the past 15 years has focused on three pillars. The first pillar consists of a system of key registries, which are anchored in law and form the information backbone for government tasks in the spatial domain. The geospatial key registers include cadastral information, topographic information at multiple scales, addresses and buildings, and tax properties. The development and adoption of semantic standards is an important part of the strategy to realize these key registers.

The second pillar consists of the open data policy and the active promotion of the use of these government data by citizens and the corporate sector. For this, a national geoportal has been developed, in which virtually all Dutch government data with open standards interfaces can be used.
The third pillar consists of the demand-oriented further development of this national infrastructure. This is currently being done for the subsurface which has led to the subsurface key register. This is currently under development with more than 25 different data types.

“Relevant policies, standards and regulations are important to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Digital Twin.”

Building on this, the contours of the next plateau of the national and vital data infrastructure are currently being determined. This will be guided by the national spatial challenges: construction of 1 million new homes, replacement investments in the national road, rail and water infrastructure, adaptation to Climate Change, among others. Digital Twin has been chosen as the guiding concept, in which data, mathematical models and visualization techniques are integrated.

Digital Twin infrastructure

With the National Digital Twin as an ecosystem of many Dutch digital twins, it advances the value of the national spatial data infrastructure. With the real-world modelling capabilities based on our key registries and offered by several private companies, many cities are already exploring digital twins for urban problem-solving. Road, airport, port and rail authorities, such as Rijkswaterstaat, Schiphol and the Port of Rotterdam have developed 3D digital models for infrastructure (predictive) maintenance. The National Digital Twin will have data from both public agencies and the private sector.

Public-private partnership

Data infrastructure is at the core of the Digital Twin. While the government will be primarily responsible for the fundamental data, it will require cooperation and collaboration from the private sector, which owns a huge amount of rich data. And this won’t be limited to data providers; technology providers and academia will also be involved.

Ecosystem of standards

Relevant policies, standards and regulations are important to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Digital Twin. But as with most ground-breaking technologies, pairing physical artefacts with digital models for the Digital Twin will have ethical implications.