A Digital twin is a copy of the reality. Data you can analyse and make simulation on.

That’s it. Digital Twin is a buzzword.

What is really a Digital Twin, so?

IMHO a Digital Twin is part of you geospatial strategy.

It is the answer to the question “What do we need to fullfil our need?”.

So, it may be a traditional 2D map of the whole area, a fully fledged 3D representation, a LiDAR survey of what you need to tackle.

A Digital Twin is something you can use to empower yourself, allowing information extraction from data.

Data are your driver for innovation and allow you to make analysis and simulation, in order to give you answers to the questions you may have.

Moving towards a Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure

Once we have established what a Digital Twin is, the next task is to lay down a strategic path to achieve that.

The idea is to obtain a maintainable set of data, and those data should be shared among your organization and they should last forever.

Forever is intended as “they must evolve with time in order to be actual and useful”.

Location data in intended to be placed into a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and coordinated by a set of tools to update, manage and analyze data.

Different data types implies different tools and solutions, so based on that you need to find the best set of instruments that fits that.

The main objective of this strategic process for GIS is the knowledge extraction, and this leads to the construction of a Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure.