Geographic Information Systems

"A picture paints a thousand words"

And today, we might say, after donning our META googles, "Just show me."

Enterprise-Level Digital Twins require spatial awareness - as we are virtualizing a truly physical reality.

Electric Transmission and Distribution Lines with sensors activated indicating warming as a wildfire apporaches
A pump station in a sewer system that must be actuated when upstream combined stormwater intakes become too great
A transmission tower much be switched over to an alternative when it's struck by lightning
A smart city's smart street lights must also report a possible crime by switching it's activated camera on at a faraway police station
A miner's helmet actuates a gate in front of him, so that he cannot proceed due to unsafe gas levels in the shaft
A fleet reroutes several vehicles instantly upon alert that a major highway is starting to pile up behind a crash

The scenarios are endless, but with the power of cloud computing, integrated SaaS, big data, AI/ML/LLM, IoT, and all the other endless miracles Industry 4.0 has bestowed upon us, we can virtualize the real world more completely every day, with GIS at the center of the effort.

Every physical asset, device, actuator, service vehicle and field engineer must be located in order to realize the Enterprise Digital Twin.

This can only be accomplishes by knowing is global position and recording it in a spatial system of record with respect to every other object of interest. The positions, integrated with all systems for asset management, data acquisition and tagging, database query, and real time communication between the real object and the ever-more complex cloud modeling system that connects each object to its twin by a digital thread in the cloud ensure that at any moment, we can cruise with AR/VR through our virtual world to manage the real one in real time....