Since next week is all about GIS, I thought I'd talk about what I'd like to see merged, BIM and GIS.
BIM (Building Information Model), digital twin, there's a few terms out there and each term has a more specific context, like certain standards around BIM, but what it really means is representing real world objects in the physical world in a computer in order to design, build, maintain, and operate them.
BIM is used more by vertical (building) construction folks and has some specific standards. Horizontal (roads, pipelines, etc) construction folks are starting to use BIM, and some of the same standards, but of course the B in BIM gets awkward. Digital Twin was used more in manufacturing space, then bridge and complex infrastructure, and it's now somewhat interchangeable. Another key is that it's not just the spatial data (2D and 3D points and shapes) but also information about those real world objects and their relationships (the material, the model, speed of a turbine, etc).
However, the tooling out there doesn't seem to be made for the web, APIs, or client (web browser) <-> server viewing and manipulation. GIS has been doing this for decades at this point, now in 2D and 3D. I had to wait two minutes for a BIM viewer to load a file in my web browser, use GBs of memory, and be slow. Using 2D and 3D tiling, Google Maps, ArcGIS Online, and similar web viewers are able to visualize 2D and 3D objects and display information. There's also standard APIs that can read and write information. Can we get BIM here? Can BIM, digital twin, and GIS merge in spatial data or digital twin (no B and not necessarily geo)?