MANAGING URBAN DIGITAL TWINS WITH AN EXTENDED CATALOG SERVICE

Abstract

A city is a complex system and involves many stakeholders with different interests and information about the physical city objects. Information integration from distributed sources is therefore a common challenge in many Smart City projects, as well as in projects for setting up Urban Digital Twins (UDT). In the context of distributed data infrastructures, catalog systems provide a significant contribution to solving the data integration challenge. However, neither existing catalogs for managing urban data nor catalogs used in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) are tailored for managing UDTs. In response to this gap, our research focuses on the development of an extended catalog service including a metadata model specifically designed to manage distributed UDTs. The requirements for the metadata model and the functionality of the catalog were obtained from several smart city projects. As a proof of concept, the paper shows how the catalog implemented on the basis of the CKAN software package is used for managing the UDT of an urban redevelopment project in the city of Munich, Germany.