Magalhães L., Meszaros S., Thoeye T., Tamisier T., Castignani G.
Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies, vol. 304, pp. 272-282, 2027
The deployment of Local Digital Twins (LDTs) across European cities and communities is advancing rapidly under the Digital Europe programme, notably with the project Local Digital Twins for Sustainable and Smart Communities (LDT4SSC) supporting cross-border pilot initiatives toward an interoperable, federated ecosystem. A key challenge to this effort is the parallel coexistence of two technology families for structuring and exchanging data in local digital twins: one RDF-based; another NGSI-LD based. These families differ not only in their serialisation formats, but more fundamentally in their architectural assumptions, information models, approaches to vocabulary governance, and relationship to geospatial standards. This paper briefly analyses the structural tensions between the two paradigms, drawing on the requirements of the LDT4SSC Calls for Pilots and the emerging common architecture for the CitiVERSE European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC). Rather than asking whether interoperability between the two families is achievable, this paper argues why a blueprint for European LDTs should make this effort, inviting the LDT4SSC consortium, its pilot projects, the Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs) Plus, and the general stakeholder community to develop how to technically achieve it.
