Defining a vision for data in the built environment – A workshop on Digital Building Logbooks

On 28 November 2024, BPIE and the Building Passport Alignment Project team from University College London (UCL), organised an in-person workshop to identify and discuss the opportunities for the prospective evolution of Digital Building Logbooks (DBLs), explore how they can support data transparency, availability, and assurance for a broad range of market players, across the construction and real estate information chain. 

The one-day event – funded by the Circular Buildings Coalition – brought together EU policymakers from a broad range of policy areas along with finance providers, building sector stakeholders, logbook developers, and the academic community. Representatives from the European Commission (DG GROW, DG ENER, DG ENV and HaDEA), as well as from the UNEP and the Global ABC actively contributed to the different discussions tackled throughout the day.   

The first part of the workshop was dedicated to short presentations that introduced the topic of DBLs and set the scene. This included the welcoming words of BPIE’s Executive Director, Oliver Rapf, who was followed by the two main organisers of the event, Kell Jones, from the Building Passport Alignment project and Zsolt Toth, Team Lead at BPIE. Zsolt also referred the policy work done by BPIE in context of the Demo-BLog project, a policy factsheet on DBLs in the EU.   

Philippe Moseley from the Construction Unit at DG GROW concluded this first part presenting the “Technical Study for the development and implementation of digital building logbooks”, produced by the Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship& SMEs at the European Commission.  

The interactive part of the workshop, led by Karim Farghaly from UCL, began by exploring some of the data challenges that exist today in the built environment, and what the world would look like if all the challenges were solved. Participants worked together in breakout groups and shared main outcomes of their discussions with everyone. Five key themes were identified, following an ideal vision in which information should be TACIT: 

• Transparent 

• Aligned 

• Clear 

• Interoperable 

• Trustworthy 

After lunch, we heard about the current state of the art in DBLs with presentations from CAPSA (by Chill Services), Woningpas (by VITO) and Madaster. The afternoon was then spent exploring what needs to be done – and how urgently – to deliver this co-created Vision for Data in the Built Environment.  

The last session involved a group activity to identify a realistic timeline for the delivery of the infrastructure for the co-created vision for DBLs, the necessary steps to achieve that, and the funding needs to make that vision happen.

This report gathers the key takeaways from the workshop. It presents the framing of the challenge, sectoral visions for data in the built environment which have been combined into a unified vision, and concludes with a series of prioritised policy recommendations.  

As Kell Jones already concluded during the event: “Each of the themes supporting the vision begins with a common language, or as the Construction Product Regulations calls it, a common data dictionary. With our Building Passport Alignment Project, we’re making the first steps on the road to this data dictionary at the building level and are linking up with organisations across the world to make it a reality.” 

The main highlights of the workshop also serve to further develop the policy work BPIE is carrying out in the context of the Demo-BLog project, which will take shape of an EU policy roadmap.  

Click here to read the report.