DAFNI Newsletter – May 2020

DAFNI is supporting the modelling and data curation to support the creation of digital twins. The planned in-person event on digital twins has gone online in a series of webinars.

In last week’s video, Dr Brian Matthews, Project Lead for DAFNI explains:

• What DAFNI is and what is a national digital twin
• The challenges DAFNI is addressing in support of digital twins
• How DAFNI is supporting the modelling and data curation to support the creation of digital twins

Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/TwOWAlSeS68

Professor Jim Hall, chair of the DAFNI Governance Board, has contributed to the UK Parliament’s POST Note on ‘Infrastructure and Climate Change’ published in March 2020, which looks at the main climate-related risks to the UK’s economic infrastructure, measures to reduce these risks and the main challenges to implementing resilience measures. DAFNI is highlighted as UKCRIC’s online platform to encourage sharing of infrastructure data between Government, industry and academia.

POST is the UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, a body which bridges research and policy to provide reliable and up-to-date research evidence for the UK Parliament.

Find the report here

We are pleased to announce that our first DAFNI Champion is Adrian Hickford of University of Southampton. Adrian is a research assistant in the Engineering and Physical Sciences Department.

Adrian is the first of a number of champions joining DAFNI to work with the DAFNI team and their home institutions to provide and explore use cases using the DAFNI facility, give feedback to the technical team on system requirements to meet researchers needs and disseminate and promote the DAFNI facility throughout their partner links.

Our recent Call for Champions resulted in a good number of high applications and we will soon be announcing more successful applicants.

Champions will be working with DAFNI on four important aspects for success:

• Engaging with the research communities and building an enthusiastic community for DAFNI
• Refining requirements and evaluation to help steer the ongoing DAFNI development with additional functionality
• Integrating a range of infrastructure models and data to expand the DAFNI library
• Building a central point for shared data, simulation and knowledge to bring the UK closer to providing a federated national digital twin.

Now available: model uploads

The past weeks have seen an incredible amount of work on the modelling services in the platform. Researchers will now be able to upload their model, marking a very exciting development for the DAFNI facility.

We have currently 20 users on the facility who are trialling each aspect of the service and giving feedback to the team. In the current push, users are now building their models using the model user documentation and bringing their models onto the DAFNI platform. We hope that this will increase as the facility’s functionality is improved over time. In due course we will be providing training webinars on a number of aspects of using the DAFNI facility.

The DAFNI development team is focusing working hard behind the scenes with a view to rolling out the following enhancements in the coming weeks:

• Transition to new metadata schema for the data store, adhering to standards which comply with the DCAT v2 vocabulary. This will form the basis for long-term data curation, interoperability and search and discovery services
• Updated search and discoverability service, incorporating the newly adopted metadata standards
• Dataset versioning
• Additional functionality for users’ dataset management, allowing them greater power to curate their datasets via the DAFNI web interface.

• CDBB – Conceptualising Digital Twins webinar and video series. Running currently. Take part in a five-part series exploring how digital twins are defined and the overarching concepts around them a series of videos and discussions. View the full series and register here.
• Bristol Urban Observatory – Virtual Hackathon. September 2020. We are working with Dr Theo Tryfonas and the team at Bristol’s Urban Observatory to bring city data onto DAFNI.
• DAFNI Showcase Event Webinar. Planned for January 2021. As a newsletter recipient you’ll be the first to know when bookings are open; encourage your colleagues to be in the know – ask them to join our mailing list.