Digital Twins are realistic digital representations of the physical world, frequently characterised by a two way link between digital and physical. Originating in manufacturing, they are now expanding to city and national scales. In this paper we explore connections between Geographic Information Science and National Digital Twins. Six different viewpoints and perspectives are presented on the topic, highlighting the importance of: geospatial data engineering; metadata engineering; standards; challenges facing mapping agencies; governance and public values; and a ”reality check” that explores the gaps between what is required and what can currently be achieved. We present 22 recommendations and summarise the findings by presenting a high level research agenda to enable better understanding and articulation of the link between the two.@en

The basic concept of a Digital Twin (DT) is a realistic digital representation of a physical thing with two-way flow of information from the physical to the model and back: one way is a refinement of the digital representation, back is the triggering of real impacts on the depicted reality. This concept was introduced by the manufacturing community to improve product life-cycle. It has extended to the built environment and underpins areas ranging from urban administration to telecommunications. Locationenabled Digital Twins are investigated at city and national levels motivated by cost reduction, efficiency, decision-making and innovation, and particularly to contribute to local and national Net Zero initiatives [Ellul et al. 2022].@en

Growing interest is awarded to the digitalization of the building permitting use case and many works are developed about the topic. However, the subject is very complex and many aspects are usually tackled separately, making it very hard for traditional literature reviews to grasp the actual progress in the overall topic. This paper unveils the detailed state of the art in Digital Building Permitting (DBP) by critically analysing the literature by means of a set of coding tags (research progress, implementation, affected DBP workflow steps, ambitions addressed) assigned by a multidisciplinary team. The executed research shows that the mainly addressed aspects of the digitalization of building permit process are the technologies to check the compliance of design proposals against regulations, followed by the digitalization of regulations. Improvable aspects identified in the entire building permit system are instead e.g. the involvement of officers, scalability of solutions and interoperability of data, intended both as data validation and as integration of geospatial data with building models.

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