Digital Twin sensors in cultural heritage applications

Abstract: The paper concerns the extension of the Heritage Digital Twin Ontology introduced in previous work to describe the reactivity of digital twins used for cultural heritage documentation by including the semantic description of sensors and activators and all the process of interacting with the real world. After analysing previous work on the use of digital twins in cultural heritage, a summary description of the Heritage Digital Twin Ontology is provided, and the existing applications of digital twins to cultural heritage are overviewed, with references to reviews summarizing the large production of scientific contributions on the topic. Then a novel ontology, named Reactive Digital Twin Ontology is described, in which sensors, activators and the decision processes are also semantically described, turning the previous synchronic approach to cultural heritage documentation into a diachronic one. Some case studies exemplify this theory.