Book Image

Hands-On Azure Digital Twins

By : Alexander Meijers
Book Image

Hands-On Azure Digital Twins

By: Alexander Meijers

Overview of this book

In today’s world, clients are using more and more IoT sensors to monitor their business processes and assets. Think about collecting information such as pressure in an engine, the temperature, or a light switch being turned on or off in a room. The data collected can be used to create smart solutions for predicting future trends, creating simulations, and drawing insights using visualizations. This makes it beneficial for organizations to make digital twins, which are digital replicas of the real environment, to support these smart solutions. This book will help you understand the concept of digital twins and how it can be implemented using an Azure service called Azure Digital Twins. Starting with the requirements and installation of the Azure Digital Twins service, the book will explain the definition language used for modeling digital twins. From there, you'll go through each step of building digital twins using Azure Digital Twins and learn about the different SDKs and APIs and how to use them with several Azure services. Finally, you'll learn how digital twins can be used in practice with the help of several real-world scenarios. By the end of this book, you'll be confident in building and designing digital twins and integrating them with various Azure services.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Section 1: Azure Digital Twin Essentials
4
Section 2: Getting Started with Azure Digital Twins
11
Section 3: Digital Twins Advanced Techniques
19
Section 4: Digital Twin Implementations in Real-world Scenarios

Using industry-standard ontologies

There are several industry-standard ontologies available that are open source. These ontologies are, in most cases, easy to adopt and are extendable.

Microsoft offers, through GitHub, several industry-standard ontologies. Currently, the following are available:

Table 2

We will be focusing on two of them. These are specified in more detail in the following table:

Table 3

Most of the topologies you find online are not already converted to the DTDL language. Take, for example, the smart building ontology. It originates from an ontology that is represented by using the W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL is a semantic language that allows us to design simple to complex ontologies by defining and storing the knowledge of entities, their properties, and their relationships. Web-based Visualization of Ontologies (WebVOWL) is a web-based application for interactive visualization of ontologies based on the OWL language...