Requirements for an ontology of digital twins

Digital twin connects concrete systems to digital representations, encoding the real world using software systems, tools and models. Therefore, digital twins should comprise abstractions, formal namings and definitions of categories, properties and relations between concepts, data and entities substantiating one, many or every element of some domain of interest. Considering the possible synergies between digital twins and ontology, and the growing demand for connecting the physical and the virtual world through explicit ontological grounding, our work proposes preliminary discussions about requirements to build an ontology of digital twins. We outline some relevant topics both in the field of digital twins and ontology that are important for the proposal of core reference ontology in the field. We also explore these requirements in detail, from the conception and creation of the virtual environment and the digital twins, to the synchronization between digital world and real world, in addition to computational services, including visualization, prediction, and prescription. Finally, we present topics for future work.