Creating a universal semantic material bank: Integrating digital twins and semantic web technologies for circular urban mining

Urban mining is a central concept for circular and sustainable resource management within an urban built environment. It promotes retrieving reusable resources from decommissioned built assets, reducing waste and carbon emissions. The dynamism of the quantity, type, and availability of the mined resources across space and time results in the complexity of the urban mining process. Managing such complex dynamics requires robust digital infrastructure, where seamless information exchange between stakeholders and across tools facilitates the circulation of materials and components in the physical world. To this end, a digital urban material bank is needed to connect the right resources and stakeholders within an urban mine to close the material loop. For the circular construction data to be consumable for a material bank, it must be structured and interoperable. Digital twinning is a promising approach to structure the circular information of physically built assets in a machine-readable and interoperable way. Urban material bank architecture can be aligned with digital twin technologies in order to facilitate circular decision-making. This chapter puts forward the concept of the Universal Semantic Material Bank, which is a decentralized network of connected urban data silos, i.e., urban material banks, through a digital infrastructure that harmonizes information exchange: Semantic Web Technology. Semantic Web-based solutions eliminate the need for integration since information can be easily queried over the Web. This interoperability simplifies sharing and accessing data across various platforms and use-cases, ultimately promoting greater connectivity and collaboration. Moreover, an integrated Universal Semantic Material Bank helps answer the unanticipated urban needs and improve decision-making through enhanced information transparency of different data silos. Having all information structured, machine-readable, and interoperable has multiple advantages at urban (local) and universal (global) levels. As a result of monitoring the spatial distribution of resources and input and output flows, not only does it enable society to achieve resource efficiency, but the regional resource sovereignty could also be enhanced. At the same time, extra-regional illegal waste trafficking and dumping could be better controlled, promoting environmental justice.