Digital Building Logbooks – the BUILDCHAIN vision

Abstract The BUILDCHAIN vision is to build a Knowledge Base, that can be used to trace all activities related to the overall life-cycle of buildings. Since various directives of the EU are related to sustainability, resilience and energy efficiency of building stock, it is necessary to provide a marketplace where various actors can share their offers, including their quality certificates and credentials, and where it would be possible to log and trace every information, activity and change, and use the knowledge to improve sustainability. The project extends the concept of Digital Building LogBook (DBL) with several available and novel data, tools and functionalities, by the help of a Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG), an open source blockchain based solution. Specific building-related ontologies are included in the DKG, so that the whole knowledge base about the life-cycle of the building can be logged and by that continuously updated, providing mechanisms and interfaces for the relevant stakeholders, to publish, trace, share, tokenize, end even trade models in a market economy. Such information integration can support decisions on optimal adaptation and intervention planning strategies for large populations of buildings. The DBL is integrated with several new functionalities demonstrated on a dozen of use cases via easily accessible and publicly available APIs. The new DBL based applications are now tested on pilot buildings focusing on historical and critical buildings, and on building stocks. The project targets a smarter and more sustainable built environment of the EU providing new market and new value creation.