European National Road Authorities recognise that an inadequate or inaccurate information asset leads to higher capital and operational expenditure on physical assets. By gathering data throughout the life-cycle of assets, asset owners and managers create so-called ‘digital twins’, to enable them to optimise their assets’ performance and operation. With these virtual replicas of their assets they can liberate data from legacy/proprietary computer applications and thereby reuse it for making better decisions. The INTERLINK consortium seeks to enable this asset information challenge. This paper reports the first results of the ongoing INTERLINK project: the business and information needs of asset managers and the common principles for modelling so called object-type libraries. These principles will be tested in three cases and will lead to a basic version of a European road object-type library. This will allow for a new approach towards standardisation of information exchange and sharing in the industry, based on evolutionary, bottom-up development and reuse of best practice whenever possible.