Digital Twin of the Ocean Development with Standards and Best Practices

Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTOs) are digital representations of ocean systems that integrate diverse data sources and models. Standards and practices are crucial for ensuring interoperability, comparability, and collaboration between DTO systems and projects, facilitating data sharing, model integration, and stakeholder engagement. This paper outlines the need and necessity for standards and practices in the fairly young field of DTOs. It argues that both are important for ensuring consistency and uniformity in the development of DTOs. It further showcases examples of standards and practices in use of the Iliad Project, as well as currently ongoing standardization activities in the broader Digital Twin ecosystem. The work presented in this paper is based on the Iliad Project, a collaborative effort of over 50 organizations, which aims to create interoperable DTOs using a system-of-systems approach. Because of this, the Iliad Project emphasizes interoperability and as such depends on well-defined data interfaces and collaboration standards and community agreed practices. To support this effort, the Iliad Consortium created and maintains a Compendium of practices, standards and ontologies as a living document, which supports future DTO developers & contributors and fosters collaboration within the digital twin and ocean research communities. It documents practices, standards and ontologies developed within the project and existing ones in use within Iliad DTOs.