Iliad Approach for Semantic Interoperability in Digital Twins of the Ocean

The Iliad project builds on the assets resulting from two decades of investments in policies and infrastructures for the blue economy and aims at establishing an interoperable, data-intensive, and cost-effective Digital Twins of the Ocean (DTOs). The Iliad DTOs will fuse a large volume of diverse data, in a semantically rich and data-agnostic approach to enable communication with real world systems and models. One of the main challenges to achieve that vision is the limited and/or lack of interoperability between different systems and models in the domain, hampering the exchange of data and an integrated data access to exploit the full value of available data. Iliad is addressing these challenges following an incremental approach towards a full semantic interoperability. This paper presents this approach, which relies on three main pillars, including the specification of common semantic data models based on existing standards, methods and tools for data harmonization providing the mechanisms to produce and consume data, and standardized APIs to enable access to the harmonized data.