Interoperability objectives
The digital-twin ecosystem already has valuable ways to describe buildings, assets, geometry and robots. P3DF’s contribution is a portable spatial context that brings geometry, relationships, navigation and recorded state together.
Adoption should make earlier investments more useful. The goal is for information to travel across tools while retaining its original domain meaning, provenance and limitations.
Standards and proposed mappings
| Technology | Its role | P3DF relationship |
|---|---|---|
| glTF / GLB | Visual 3D asset delivery | GLB is the draft visual geometry representation. |
| Apache Arrow / Parquet | Structured columnar data | Used in the draft for telemetry and navigation arrays. |
| JSON / JSON-LD context | Structured data and semantic vocabulary context | Scene data and vocabulary references in the draft. |
| IFC | Built-environment information | Potential source of building semantics. Bridge proposed. |
| OpenUSD | Scene description and composition | Potential scene and geometry bridge. Proposed. |
| AAS / AASX | Industrial asset administration and exchange | Potential industrial semantic mapping. Proposed. |
| URDF / ROS 2 | Robot description and robotics integration | Potential robotics integration. Outside initial scope. |
Validation requirements
Using GLB inside a package does not by itself mean every glTF viewer can open a .p3df file. A bridge requires an implementation, documented mapping rules and testable behavior. Conversion can also lose information; a useful bridge reports that loss explicitly.
P3DF does not currently claim certified AAS, IFC, OpenUSD or ROS compatibility. We invite specialists from these ecosystems to help define and test the proposed bridges.
Reference standards
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