Second Day of the Geospatial World Forum, 2023 began with the Plenary Keynote session on Geospatial Infrastructure and National Digital Twins moderated by Mark Reichardt, Senior Consultant, Geospatial World.
The session focused on how the combination of Geospatial Infrastructure and Digital Twins will play a crucial role in achieving national priorities and ensuring sustainable development.
Mark elaborated on the value of geospatial infrastructure and its Impact on decision-making and stimulating economy.
With a National Digital Twin in place, it becomes easier for countries to measure project outcomes more effectively, prioritize their development goals, and plan sustainably.
Digital Twin Germany: A Keystone Initiative
Paul Becker, President, Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) started the session talking about the digital twin for Germany, which is a leader in digital adoption.
Digital Twin for Germany is a data pool for decision-makers, allowing them to investigate ways to achieve equal living conditions and enhance accessibility to important points of interest such as police station and fire stations.
The Keystone of Geospatial Digital twin is a standard inventory of assets including 3D models, points of interest and experts. Digital Twin for Germany will incorporate data from existing information and federal authorities. Interoperability promotes data of different subject areas.
The National Digital twin for Germany is able to replicate vegetation, building and infrastructure in realistic 3D models. These were all tested out in demonstration phase in the city of Hamburg, Europe’s third busiest port.
Fields of application for Digital Twin Germany includes agriculture, disaster risk reduction and urban planning solutions. With Digital twin, natural disasters like forest fires can be predicted and different response strategies can be simulated for effective and safe firefighting effort.
Other instances where Digital twins were used in mitigating natural disasters where the flood disasters in Germany in Ahr Valley, 2021 where entire settlements were destroyed.
Christine Najar, Co-Head of SGS Office, Federal Office of Topography swisstopo talked about the geospatial infrastructure and digital twin in the Swiss geoinformation strategy and making available 854 spatial data sets and 75,000 map visit viewers per day on a web portal.
“The evolution of Swiss Geoinformation Strategy followed three stages namely; easy access to geodata which was achieved by 2001, linking geoinformation by 2021 and a goal of integrating Geoknowledge by 2025.”
Exponential Growth of Digital Twins
“Digital Twins up until now were established in only certain industries, those industries that had something to lose but it is slowly leaking into different industries with a dramatic increase in use cases in the next 10 years,” says Nigel Clifford, Deputy Chairman, Geospatial Commission, The UK.
It is going from niche to mainstream now, both in public and private domain.
“Q-Fair (Quality, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data will be the fuel for Digital Twins. The National Commission with its partner bodies did an audit of data across the geospatial domain and found areas of improvement for the quality of data,” adds Clifford.
“While there is going to be a lot of conversation on harder elements in digital twins, in terms of the technology and sensors, I think it’s going to be the softer elements like the behaviors and the safeguards that’s going to make the difference”, concluded Clifford.
