Project History

The World Avatar™ project is the brainchild of Professor Markus Kraft, CARES director at the Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore. Starting with the core knowledge graph technology, the project has since expanded to address a number of research & commercial issues relating to digital interoperability.

In collaboration with key contributors CARES, CoMo, CMCL, and CMPG, The World Avatar™ has quickly grown to support a number of different technologies and approaches, all put to use in a number of cutting-edge, industry leading projects. For more information on these, please see our Case Studies page.

1999
1999

Ideation

Prof Markus Kraft first has the idea for a collaborative, open source ecosystem that will unlock the power of data through semantic meaning and easy interoperability.
2000
2000

SRM Engine Suite

With an aim to improve fuel efficiency and reduce the increasing strain on the climate, research and development on better IC engines begin. This will form the foundation of the upcoming SRM Engine Suite.
2010
2010

The future of computational modellling in reaction engineering

In their new paper, CoMo outline the current state and inevitable future of modelling in reaction engineering.
2010
2010

MoDS

MoDS eases the automation of robust and technically challenging statistical analyses and can be used to highlight key trends & predictions in black-box applications.
2012
2012

CompChem

Weerapong Phadungsukanan (CoMo) introduces a subdomain chemistry format for storing computational chemistry data called CompChem. It has been developed based on the design, concepts and methodologies of Chemical Markup Language.
2013
2013

Work begins at CARES

Initial research and development starts at Cambridge CARES. The idea behind the project is to connect data & computational agents to create a living digital “avatar” of the real world.
2014
2014

J-Park Simulator

CARES presents the first use case of The World Avatar™, the J-Park Simulator. A growing platform for integrating real-time data, knowledge, models, & tools related to process industry.
2020
2020

UK Digital Twin

CoMo, CARES, and CMCL co-author a research paper that details how The World Avatar™ could address many of the technical challenges raised by the National Digital Twin programme in the UK.
2021
2021

Marie

CARES and CMCL work together to produce an intelligent agent that processes natural language questions into executable queries to search and filter chemical data.
2022
2022

Approach applied to CReDo

Phase one of the CReDo project shows off the potential of The World Avatar™ as an industry leading demonstrator of climate resilience across the UK's infrastructure system.
2023
2023

Pirmasens

CMPG deploys The World Avatar to model the German town of Pirmasens, assisting the local authorities via data-driven decision planning.

What's next?

Contributions to The World Avatar™ continue at a steady pace, revising core infrastructure and adding exciting new features on a weekly basis. Recent additions include the ability to visualise and interact with city-scale 3D building data, pre-generated environments for hosting data and intelligent agents, and a number of improvements to query federation and single-point access.

To learn more about what’s in store for The World Avatar™, or to become a contributor, please see our Collaborate page.