The World Avatar is a collaborative digital ecosystem which aims to connect people and knowledge to improve the liveability and sustainability of our environment.
Semantic knowledge graphs offer a useful way of consistently representing concepts, instances and the relationships between them based on formal ontologies. To solve the interoperability problems within and across sectors, we have been contributing to a collaborative digital ecosystem, The World Avatar (website).
The World Avatar is based on technologies from the Semantic Web, which gives us a general-purpose distributed framework to work with. We use ontologies to give a semantic description of the models and data. The World Avatar represents a world model that is dynamic in nature, enabled by the computational agents that update the knowledge graph, but are also part of it.
What can it solve?
Across many industries, issues with interoperability lead to ineffective decision making. The semantic nature of The World Avatar means that data is by design interoperable, across different data formats and heterogeneous sources.
By enabling interoperability, connected digital twins can be created that describe the state and the behaviour of complex systems and provide data-driven decision-support on how to optimise the systems.
This interoperability also paves the way to harness the real benefits of connectivity through Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS). It enables our customers to pursue use cases across multiple domains such as automotive, materials, energy, smart cities and infrastructure that could not be perceived consistently before.
See our recent publications that introduce our dynamic knowledge graph approach to digital twins, and associated cross-sector use cases covering infrastructure, climate change, maritime, environment, land use and other sectors.
In summary, The World Avatar enables:
- Interoperability between heterogeneous data and software
- The ability to account for the dynamic nature of data and information
- The construction of digital twins and interactions between them
- A live representation of real-world aspects that can aid in scenario analysis and cross-domain decision support
- Knowledge management while taking into account the context of the data
Use cases
Some successful use cases of The World Avatar include:
- Marie: A proof-of-concept semantic Question Answering system with Natural Language Processing (NLP) for chemistry domain
- UK Digital Twin: A comprehensive digital twin implemented as a dynamic Knowledge Graph including notions of a base world and parallel worlds, which covers multiple energy-related infrastructure such as electrical power system, gas grid, and biomass land use
- District Heat Optimisation: A district heat network in Pirmasens was modelled and optimised using The World Avatar, leading to a 45% reduction in gas usage with no impact on performance
- Climate Resilience Demonstrator: A collaborative project aimed at visualising the relationships and dependencies between critical infrastructure assets
How can we help?
Whether you are new to digitalisation or have established initiatives in the form of IoT, IoS, or Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), we can collaborate and deliver value in multiple ways.
Engage with our technical services team to discuss:
- Consulting: Application of The World Avatar technology to your problems
- Research: Collaborative research and development into aspects of dynamic Knowledge Graph technology and its applications
- Training: Our dedicated training course, “Knowledge Graphs as enablers for a step change in interoperability in a complex dynamic world”
Open Source
See how The World Avatar file structure (GitHub) has changed over time: