From Certified Pairs to a Certified Hub: Reasoner-Checked Crosswalks for the Information Exchange Standard

arXiv:2611.06628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A national digital twin was conceived as an ecosystem of twins connected through mappings to a common foundation, but the roadmap that promises to confirm those mappings are valid never says what valid means. We give the test a precise form, coherence and conservativity of the merged ontology, borrowed from logic-based alignment repair, and apply it to the Information Exchange Standard (IES), first pair by pair and then to whole hubs. Crosswalks from IES into thirteen ontologies across seven sector groups, anchored on the building ontologies BOT, Brick, and SAREF4BLDG, pass through separate stages of matching, human review, certification of each SKOS correspondence against the two class hierarchies, and reasoning with HermiT. Pair by pair, the stages catch different failures: certification alone removed all 526 conservativity violations of the raw crosswalks, review alone left 73, and together they made eleven of twelve overlapping pairs coherent and conservative. Pairwise certification does not compose. Merging the three certified building crosswalks into one hub made five Brick classes unsatisfiable, through a homonym between the IES and Brick notions of a floor that only BOT's disjointness axioms expose; rejecting that one row gave a coherent and conservative hub that entails 290 cross-ontology links nobody wrote down. The core hub is inconsistent before any crosswalk is added, because two published standards, the Open Energy Ontology and BFO 2020, contradict each other; with either one left out it is coherent and conservative. A hub, not a pair, is the unit an ecosystem of twins has to certify.