A platform to integrate housing data for large-scale renovations

In the Netherlands, the building sector with more than 2.6 million houses built in the post-war period contributes significantly to the country’s energy consumption. Therefore, to meet the Dutch government’s targets to fulfill the Paris Climate agreement (2015) goals, the housing renovation process needs substantial upscaling. Digitalization can significantly influence the acceleration of the renovation rates by providing required information for large-scale tenders and industrialized constructions. In this project, a prototype of a data platform for managing the physical characteristics of existing dwellings is being developed to provide the information required for performing calculations and analysis for tendering renovations. Such information includes dwellings’ geometrical models, material characteristics, and related geospatial data, extracted and aggregated from various sources from housing associations to national organizations’ databases. Such data is being provided in a combined data platform and accessed using standard protocols to support open data access so that a holistic analysis can be performed to produce practical renovation advice to homeowners. Thus, it is required to answer what data is required for clustering and tendering the renovation projects and how this data can be provided through an integrated platform keeping the source data is owned and managed by different parties. We found that deploying a combination of cutting-edge ICT technologies such as Linked Data and GraphQL has a great potential to fulfill this desire. In this regard, a microservice approach integrated by property graphs and GraphQL technology has been adopted, resulting in a uniform query language and scalable platform design. However, data privacy and standardization still need to be tackled as the required data belongs to different knowledge domains and is scattered among multiple data sources and owned by various organizations.