The term Digital Thread made its first appearance in a 2013 Global Horizon report, but wasn't officially defined until 2018 when Singh & Willcox at MIT wrote about Digital Threads in a white paper titled "Engineering with a Digital Thread". In this academic essay the term Digital Thread is described as "a data-driven architecture that links together information generated from across the product lifecycle and is envisioned to be the primary or authoritative data and communication platform for a company’s products at any instance of time."

So what exactly is a data fabric? Data fabrics are the best means of storing, networking, and contextualizing data that we have today. Data fabrics give us the best shot of getting to this highly connected Industrial Metaverse. So what are the key features and advantages of data fabric architectures?