Master's thesis project suggestion

Graph-based versioning for city digital twins

Background

As a digital twin model of a city changes over time, it is important to maintain a record of the changes so that versions of the city model at different time points can be accessed. The need for versioning of city models is descibed by Eriksson and Harrie (2021) and this issue has also come up in discussions among partners in the Chalmers Digital Twin Cities Centre.

Graph databases present new approaches to managing versions of data, including time-based versioned graphs (Robinson, 2014) and an approach based on time-stamped triples in an RDF graph (Kovacevic et al., 2022).

Project description

The aim of this project is to compare versioning approaches in graph-based databases with other approaches to versioning data in city digital twins.

References

• Eriksson, H. and Harrie, L., 2021. Versioning of 3D city models for municipality applications: Needs, obstacles and recommendations. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 10(2), p.55. doi:10.3390/ijgi10020055
• Kovacevic, F., Ekaputra, F.J., Miksa, T. and Rauber, A., 2022. StarVers-Versioning and Timestamping RDF data by means of RDF* - An Approach based on Annotated Triples (submitted to the Semantic Web Journal)
• Robinson, I., 2014. Time-Based Versioned Graphs. Published in Cypher, Graph Databases, Neo4j (archived web version)

Special prerequisites

The course "Advanced databases" (Chalmers: DAT475, GU: DIT930) is recommended.

Suggestion author

Graham Kemp