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.