Authors: Jethro Akroyd, Zachary Harper, David N.L. Soutar, Feroz Farazi, Amit Bhave, Sebastian Mosbach, and Markus Kraft*

• Developed formal ontologies to represent geospatial land use data.
• Applied to Crop Map of England data published by UK Government.
• Developed customised vocabulary to enable geospatial queries.
• Land use data incorporated into knowledge-graph-based Universal Digital Twin.
• Cross-domain use case that performs geospatial analysis of energy provision.

This article develops an ontological description of land use and applies it to incorporate geospatial information describing land coverage into a knowledge-graph-based Universal Digital Twin. Sources of data relating to land use in the UK have been surveyed. The Crop Map of England (CROME) is produced annually by the UK Government and was identified as a valuable source of open data. Formal ontologies to represent land use and the geospatial data arising from such surveys have been developed. The ontologies have been deployed using a high-performance graph database. A customized vocabulary was developed to extend the geospatial capabilities of the graph database to support the CROME data. The integration of the CROME data into the Universal Digital Twin is demonstrated in two use cases that show the potential of the Universal Digital Twin to share data across sectors. The first use case combines data about land use with a geospatial analysis of scenarios for energy provision. The second illustrates how the Universal Digital Twin could use the land use data to support the cross-domain analysis of flood risk. Opportunities for the extension and enrichment of the ontologies, and further development of the Universal Digital Twin are discussed.

• This paper draws from preprint 276: Universal Digital Twin - Land Use
• Access the article at the publisher: DOI: 10.1017/dce.2021.21

Associated Themes: