Understanding ontologies

Building a first model requires defining all the models and their underlying relationships with your digital twin. Starting a digital twin from scratch can be a very time-consuming undertaking. It requires the identification of the different entities that play a role within the digital twin. Additionally, it also requires thinking about what properties and relationships we need to consider to have our digital twin deliver what we want.

The building of digital twins is often bound to a certain industry, or a part of that industry. Industry-built digital twins are all about modeling complex systems with a lot of different assets, properties, and relationships.

Wouldn't it be great to start with a predefined set of models that suits your needs? That would make it far easier to design a digital twin. We could extend such a predefined set of models in order to accommodate our own needs. To do this, we need to use ontologies.

An ontology is a structure...