Foundations for Digital Twins

The growing reliance on digital twins across various industries and domains brings with it semantic interoperability challenges. Ontologies are a well-known strategy for addressing such challenges, though given the complexity of the phenomenon, there are risks of reintroducing the interoperability challenges at the level of ontology representations. In the interest of avoiding such pitfalls, we introduce and defend characterizations of digital twins within the context of the Common Core Ontologies, an extension of the widely-used Basic Formal Ontology. We provide a set of definitions and design patterns relevant to the domain of digital twins, highlighted by illustrative use cases of digital twins and their physical counterparts. In doing so, we provide a foundation on which to build more sophisticated ontological content related and connected to digital twins.

Credentials in the Occupation Ontology

The term credential encompasses educational certificates, degrees, certifications, and government-issued licenses. An occupational credential is a verification of an individuals qualification or competence issued by a third party with relevant authority. Job seekers often leverage such credentials as evidence that desired qualifications are satisfied by their holders. Many U.S. education and workforce development organizations have recognized the importance of credentials for employment and the challenges of understanding the value of credentials. In this study, we identified and ontologically defined credential and credential-related terms at the textual and semantic levels based on the Occupation Ontology (OccO), a BFO-based ontology. Different credential types and their authorization logic are modeled. We additionally defined a high-level hierarchy of credential related terms and relations among many terms, which were initiated in concert with the Alabama Talent Triad (ATT) program, which aims to connect learners, earners, employers and education/training providers through credentials and skills. To our knowledge, our research provides for the first time systematic ontological modeling of the important domain of credentials and related contents, supporting enhanced credential data and knowledge integration in the future.