Recently, IGN (National Institute of Geographic and Forestry Information) has been particularly active. On May 15, he threw the free IGN Maps mobile app. It lifts the “veil on 90% of the territories (agricultural land, forests, beaches, etc.) that have been rendered invisible by the applications of the digital giants. With IGN Maps it is possible to know the type of cultivation of the field, the type of forest or the composition of the beach (sand or gravel).”
Construction of “geo-common goods”
“As an actor of the common good, IGN with this application brings together numerous data produced by the Institute and/or its partners, from the ministries responsible for ecology, agriculture and forestry to local authorities of all sizes, through OpenStreetMap, the Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (SDIS), National Forestry Office (ONF) and even regional and national parks.” “The app replaces the Géoportail app launched in 2015 and downloaded a million times. The information and services provided are expected to be enriched with future updates.”
At VivaTech this week, IGN highlighted its role today: that of “one of the main data operators in France” in building “geo-communities” “with public partners, local authorities, research and civil society actors, business communities and companies. Among his ads one, as a trio, door on the project of digital twin from France:
IGN, Cerema (Centre for Studies and Expertise on Risks, Environment, Mobility and Planning) and Inria (National Institute for Research in Digital Sciences and Technologies) “launch a joint appeal for the Digital Twin of France and its territories, open to all public and private actors who want to join the project. Supported by France 2030 (reindustrialization plan presented by the government in 2021)this call should enable deeper exploration of specific use cases, pooling initiatives, moving partial solutions to the national level or designing a future common technical base.”
Environment: assess impacts
“The urgency of environmental challenges confronts land management policies with unprecedented challenges that require the development of new tools. In addition to the precise description of the territory, it is now essential to be able to predict its development and simulate different management scenarios in order to evaluate or even compare, in prediction, their impacts.
This is the goal of the gradual construction of a digital twin of France proposed by IGN, Cerema and Inria (…). The General Secretariat for Investments (SGPI) has actually mandated three institutions to shape a digital twin project for France and its territories with the support of France 2030.”
Simulations, modeling: “many potential applications”
Open until September 30, the call invites public and private actors to join the “team of the French digital twin that the three institutions want to promote. This could be expressing interest in a use case, sharing feedback on the use of local digital twins, or proposing technical solutions to be integrated into the tool.”
This digital twin “has many potential applications. It can enable, for example, the simulation of scenarios of infrastructure and assets threatened by coastal erosion, with precise projections of the number of homes, people and equipment affected; combine different dimensions of sustainable territorial development – regulatory framework, urban densification, nature management in the city, multimodal mobility, access to public services; predict the effect of climate change on different types of agricultural production, especially based on introduced practices, or detect and prevent risks to crops due to droughts, frosts, floods and other extreme events; simulate the development of forests according to different climate hypotheses and predict the risks of forest fires; or test and model epidemic or epizootic scenarios.”
Interoperability and sharing
The call for the common good “will allow the logic of interoperability and association at the national level to be reconciled with the needs of local or thematic twins. The goal is to build a common database and functionality and establish a collective dynamic that will facilitate the scaling up of the twins’ digital initiatives.
in presentation detailed in the call, among the “conditions for success”: “Building a database and open-source functionality that allows scale-up of local and thematic experiments.”
THE technical challenges of the project are not small: “Of course, the concept of a digital twin is not new – there are already virtual duplicates of cities and infrastructure. But the scope of this project, as well as its simulation and analysis capabilities, make it remarkable. “There is currently no national twin as ambitious as the one we want to create,” assures Dimitri Sarafinof, project coordinator at IGN. As a result, we will be able to deal with more complex topics, long-term processes and take into account the interconnections between different regions and different public policies.”
“Ready for use” in two or three years
For Bénédicte Bucher, researcher at Lastig (Laboratory for Geographical Information Sciences and Technologies for Sustainable Cities and Territories) and responsible for the axis of integration and interoperability of the twin, the latter is a “tool for ecological transition that must help societies imagine a future achievable for their territories.”
Dimitri Sarafinof “hopes that in two or three years the twin will be ready for use. The project still aims to integrate the first use cases from the first months.”
Read also
The digital commons: Panoramax, a photo database with impressive field views – April 20, 2024
IGN: Sébastien Soriano at the helm to build a counter model to GAFAM – June 9, 2021
Open Data: IGN publishes its data – December 13, 2020
Do you know your digital twin? – January 29, 2017