Semantic Reflection and Digital Twins: A Comprehensive Overview

Semantic reflection combines reflection in programming languages with semantic technologies for knowledge representation. It enables a program to represent and query its own runtime state as a knowledge graph. The knowledge graphs reflecting program states can be combined with domain knowledge which allows queries about a program to be made in terms of a given domain vocabulary, as well as with external graph data. Both extensions of the knowledge graph reflecting the runtime state are useful for digital twins. In this paper, we discuss the basic concepts of semantic reflection, its applications for digital twins, and its connections to formal methods.