draft
What has changed
A dated record of the site, newest first.
A short record of how the site has changed, newest first. The full reasoning behind each step is in the repository's dated devlog.
2026
21 October. Every entry written by a machine was rewritten for plain reading: the status lines, the notes about what a page did not say and the shelf labels at the end of entries are gone, long sentences are broken up, and technical terms are explained where they first appear. Each rewrite was checked against the original so that no fact was lost or added. Four entries on US federal work, each read from the agency's own pages: the National Academies report on research gaps in digital twins, NASA's Earth System Digital Twins, NOAA's National Water Model, and SAWGraph, a knowledge graph of PFAS in water, soil and farms. Two drafts from the pages that Mike Liebhold's survey of Niantic Spatial pointed to: the Rancho Cordova city twin, a drone model of four square kilometres used for traffic simulation, and SPZ, the open file format for Gaussian splats. The Forests 2030 report now links to its published home. Domain descriptions are plain lists.
20 October. Primary forests: a term entry on ecosystem integrity, the report Forests 2030 from Wild Heritage and Griffith University with a copy of the PDF, the US forest maturity map, the FAO review of primary forest definitions and data, and a Columbia Insight report on why the federal old-growth inventory cannot find a stand. From Destination Earth's own pages, a fuller entry on the programme and new entries for UrbanAIR, BioDT and DT-GEO. The Contributors page names its first three.
20 October. Pictures on the shelves: eighty-six engines, data sources, twins, organizations and channels now show a picture from the maker's own page beside their entry, and every entry has a domain, so the rest show their domain's symbol. The domain pages describe what each domain covers. The Pinned list is gone from the home page; the pieces about the site itself, including the visual grammar, now live under About, with a new Contributors page.
20 October. An article, Twelve places with a question for a model: twelve recent reports, from a Kentucky creek to the Strait of Hormuz, each read for the question someone there would put to a model and the kind of model that answers it, sorted by the size of the place.
19 October. Thirty entries from a reading list: four papers and standards on the Ontologies shelf, seven engines, two viewers, five data sources, the Global Biodiversity Framework as a mandate, and ten papers and explainers, each written from its own page and checked against it by a second reader.
19 October. Technologies is arranged as a stack, in order: Data, Ontologies, Engines, Presentation. Ontologies and Presentation are new shelves; a term entry on ontology and an article, The parts of a digital twin, say why. A review of Jessica Talisman's book Ontology Pipeline joins the Ontologies shelf.
18 October. Books become Media, with the podcasts and video channels beside them. A Mandates section begins, with the 30 by 30 target as its first entry. Every engine, twin and data source gains an open block on source, data, API and participation. Eleven notable twins written from their own pages, among them eReefs, the European Digital Twin of the Ocean, Moorea IDEA, the NSW Spatial Digital Twin, Rotterdam, Zürich and Boston. The sidebar is arranged in areas: new, practice, technologies, theory, resources. Questions become use cases and sit after the guides; engines are shelved by the task a guest is trying to do. The ten use-case pages and nine guides are written. Thirty-six entries carried over from the survey are rewritten from their makers' pages. The survey's diagrams and credited images are placed on entries. A written statement of who the site is for and the bar an entry must clear. Sources widen beyond the phrase "digital twin" to a shared vocabulary of models and simulations of places; video and podcast sources join the scanner. Six planetary vital signs, refreshed at every deploy. The repository is renamed digitaltwin-wiki.
17 October. The repository goes public. digitaltwins.wiki points at the site. Bay Layers, a layered scene of San Francisco Bay, becomes the home page figure. Eighty-one entries are imported as drafts from a catalogue mined from LinkedIn posts, and a scanner begins polling papers, code, news and communities into an inbox for editors.
15 October. The site is rebuilt from scratch on a small, generic knowledge store: every entry a markdown file whose frontmatter keys are its components, with a validator, a query API and machine exports. The first build is archived.
2 October. The project begins. A September survey of the field, Digital Twins: A Survey, is split into its first entries; the ten domains and their visual vocabulary are adopted from it; the audience is stated as ordinary people with a real question about a place; a first static site goes to staging.