The Digital Thread connecting it all together

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."